Naturally, these skills are directly applicable to his role as Arthur Kipps, a harrowed, traumatised, suicidal young single father-of-one sent to catalogue the creepy shit in a haunted house on some salt marshes in The Woman In Black. Obviously a laugh a minute, there. I can only assume he took the role determined to prove himself a Serious Actor, You Guys – which we’ll talk about in a minute. First, let’s talk about the actual story.

**** Obligatory this-is-how-my-reviews-tend-to-roll SPOILER WARNING here!****

I’ve seen the stage adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel several times, because I love having the shit scared out of me. The scares in WiB come from Surprise. They’re things that jump out at you and say, “Boo”. Nothing more sophisticated than gribblies in the dark, which is a bit damning of me, but seriously – that’s all they are. They’re good at it, but I never find the horror in WiB particularly horrifying.

On stage, in the intimacy of seeing real life flesh-and-bone players getting menaced by things in the dark renders the jump-and-boo tactic of scare artistry very powerful, because you all empathise together in a big knot; you notice what the actors notice, when they notice them. Things can be hidden and sneak about, and then you, as an audience, find yourselves watching the scenery as much as the actors, and the hidden gribblies play out in real time and it’s all very nice and spooky.

SERIOUS FACE

You can’t do that in a film. You gotta work harder.  The film (directed by James Watkins) does its best to reproduce the “things lurking in the background” feel of the play by having Mr Radcliffe constantly off-centre in shots and filling the space behind him with shapes that might be an out-of-focus human face. It’s one way to create the atmosphere, and it does it well, but the main thing the film does differently from the stage show is that it recognises that cinema can’t get away with jump-scaring all the time without being boring. You have a lot more time with the camera up in your character’s face, and you gotta give them reasons for all them facial wranglings. Theatre is … all close up on your audience, and cinema is all up in your character’s grill. Distance is important. You can get away with less in film. You gotta have backstory and all that. The Woman In Black movie understands this, and Jane Goldman‘s screenplay valiantly fills the holes that the stage version simply doesn’t have the room to fill. We get suspicious villagers! Pale, zombified children drinking lye! Backstory and juice all about The Children and that, and that certainly goes some way to giving horror that’s more psychologically fulfilling than just working on pure adrenaline.

Problem is, in a way that it simply isn’t in the play (and I ain’t red t’book, so I can’t comment on that), it really is all about The Children (in the stage version, there’s a play-within-a-play motif that more-or-less prevents this focus wholesale). And, you know, while there’s nothing wrong with that per se, I just never feel particularly comfortable with anything that centralises female desire for children and biological motherhood. There’s a lot of that in the film, and I mean one hell of a lot – we’ve got the Woman In Black going literally insane over the loss of her child, first through adoption and then through death, and then we’ve got Mrs Daily (Janet McTeer), who isn’t so much of a medium as a large,¹ channelling her dead son’s spirit all over the place and keeping little dogs as child replacements, and then we’ve got Dan Radcliffe being traumatised over the death of his wife who died in childbirth and all that. So it’s a pretty central theme.

Hold up a sec, Society. I got a little request. It’s no biggie, just: CAN WE PLEASE, AS A CULTURE, STOP CENTRALISING PHYSICAL GENETIC PARENTHOOD AS THE ONLY VALID FORM OF PARENTHOOD. Please. Please. Because right here, right, we’ve got the demonisation of the Mr and Mrs Drablow – who have adopted Nathaniel, the eponymous black-clad Woman’s child – as literal child thieves. This is what drives the whole descent into madness which leads to the haunting, deaths and general destruction. That’s it. That’s the root cause. Adoption. And I know there are tales that do it worse, but seriously; The Woman In Black revolves around how terrible it is when biological parenthood is subverted, either through death, or worse, through adoption!

It drives me a bit up the wall. We know that parenthood isn’t inherently holy and pure; there’re neverending streams of news stories about the extreme situations where it all goes wrong, but what about chosen family? Is it really that terrible to form familial bonds with people to whom you are not genetically tethered?

Aside from that, this flick catalogues Dan Radcliffe’s fine ability to look serious while opening doors, see ghosts and drink heavily. That’s pretty much what he does. He does so with alarming dedication, actually, and while I know we’re meant to, as an audience, suspend disbelief and accept that he’s a man on the edge with nothing left to lose, he has a wanton lack of a survival instinct. I mean, I’d realise I was in a horror film way back at the beginning with the creepy staring children and the rural locals who are afraid of cars. You end up feeling that his determination to open all the doors and chase disturbing sounds around the OBVIOUSLY HAUNTED HOUSE is remarkable. The man’s a hero. But you do really rather want to shout, “STOP OPENING THE SODDING DOORS!” at him.² Still, his frowning skills have come on a long way from that other film thing he did when he was younger, whatever it was called.

They’ve also changed the ending from the play, which has it quite open-ended and desolate. (Skip this paragraph if you still want to watch the film without knowing the fine detail!) The film does something completely different, and it’s ridiculous. I imagine some people may find posthumous familial reunion on an otherworldly railway track quite comforting, but I found it ludicrous. It goes quite a long way to undermine the sincerity of the plot, and isn’t it funny that in horror/survival films, the pragmatic, rationally-minded one is always shown to be wrong or narrow-minded? Mr Daily (Ciarán Hinds), who is vocally sceptical of ghosts and contacting the dead… well, it’s a bloody ghost film, isn’t it? So he’s proved wrong all over the place, and the stupendously melodramatic ending pretty much consolidates his comprehensive wrongness, and I’m like, well, actually I sympathised with him a lot, so what do I take home from this?

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It does surprise!horror very well.
• It’s very well cast and located, and check out that house, I mean goddamn.
• Mrs Daily is the best thing in the film, what with her mediumage and her creepy little dogs and all.
• Oh fine, yes, Daniel Radcliffe is worth a watch as something other than that other role he played in That Other Film Series.

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It only really does the “boo!” horror very well; the rest is very, very cheesy.  That said, I found myself jumpy in the dark for a week afterwards, and I’m hard to scare.
• OH MY FUCKING GOD, ADOPTION REALLY ISN’T A SODDING CRIME, IT IS 2012 CAN WE REALISE THIS PLEASE
• The soundtrack is like Fisher Price Psychological Tension Music and I could have provided a more subtle and nuanced soundtrack on vox and kazoo.
• Some children die.  But I suppose you wouldn’t be even considering going to see this film, of all things, if that was likely to distress you.

1. DO YOU SEE WHAT I LITERALLY DID THERE
2. Which I did, several times, which is why I shouldn’t be allowed in cinemas.