Woman in Black, The

Synopsis
A widowed lawyer travels to a secluded village on an important assignment, and encounters a vengeful ghost with mysterious motives. After losing his beloved wife in childbirth, young barrister Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) was nearly consumed by grief. A haunted widower father, he raises his young son with the help of his devoted nanny. Arthur is on the verge of losing his job when an important client of the firm dies, and his boss offers him one last opportunity to prove his worth by settling the woman's affairs. Determined to succeed, Arthur travels to the remote village and receives a chilly welcome. Something horrible once happened here, and it seems that the locals are determined to ensure Arthur never finds out what it was. Now, the more time Arthur spends in his client's crumbling estate, the more aware he becomes of a presence that isn't quite human. In this house dwells a woman's ghost. In life she lost something precious, and now in death she'll do whatever it takes to get it back. Until she does, her spectral presence will serve as a harbinger of doom, always to be followed by the death of an innocent.

Reviews
3 stars out of 4 -- "The remote setting in boggy northern England is ideal for the spine-tingling tale, and the film is well-paced for maximum thrills and chills." (USA Today)

"[A] good, old-fashioned ghost yarn of the Victorian Gothic persuasion." (Los Angeles Times)

"[T]he former Harry Potter carries the film quite capably....The locations, particularly the marshland area of the house, and production design are memorable..." (Hollywood Reporter)

3 stars out of 4 -- "The house is a masterpiece of production design, crumbling, forlorn, filled with the faded and jumbled Victorian possessions of doomed lifetimes." (Chicago Sun-Times)

"A creaking, shrieking haunted-house amusement and a solid addition to the recently resurrected Hammer Films..." (New York Times)

"The picture has the soft, dark gleam of a piece of Victorian mourning jewelry, and its gloom is always offered with a wink." (Movieline)

"Post-Potter Daniel Radcliffe delivers nicely as a sad, widowed, early-1900s English lawyer....[An] old-fashioned, tastefully constrained supernatural thriller..." (Entertainment Weekly)

3 stars out of 5 -- "[Radcliffe] is terrific....Watkins and scriptwriter Jane Goldman render familiar material enjoyably, efficiently eerie." (Total Film)

"As part of a relaunch of the Hammer brand, THE WOMAN IN BLACK gives notice of the company's return to its classic strengths as a purveyor of deadpan but terrifically entertaining period frightfests." (Sight and Sound)