Review ‘The Woman In Black: Angel of Death’ From The Editor

Tom Harper’s sequel to the bafflingly popular 2012 haunted house thriller The Woman in Black looks like it was shot using day-for-night photography, but at night. You can’t see a damned thing in this movie. I had to watch it again just to confirm that there wasn’t a problem with the theater’s projection equipment. A proper showman like William Castle would have advertised this as “Squint-O-Vision,” making the audience’s desperate and futile attempt to figure out just what the heck is going on a part of the gag.

But The Woman in Black 2 takes itself too seriously for that. It is a solemn attempt to eke proper dread out of a spooky-wooky house in World War II, populated by displaced British children and their schoolmarms and a vengeful ghost. They have little in the way of personality that doesn’t stem from either personal tragedy or the primitive needs of the plot.

The time is now 1941, and Crythin Gifford lies seemingly abandoned, save for the requisite scary old blind man and, of course, its resident restless spirit. Yet somehow, this literal and figurative ghost town is deemed the perfect place to house a dozen preteen schoolchildren who are being evacuated from London at the height of the Blitz. And so they go, chaperoned by their kindly teacher Ms. Parkins (appealing newcomer Phoebe Fox) and stern headmistress (Helen McCrory), out of the frying pan and into a new kind of (hell)fire.

The idea of setting a horror story against the real-life horrors of England during WWII certainly holds promise, but if the first “Woman in Black” was laudable for its slow-burn intensity, “Angel of Death” is more of a slow lukewarm. In fact, nothing much happens at all for the first hour of the new movie (which was written by Jon Croker, from a story by Hill herself), aside from a few floorboards creaking, doors slamming and decrepit wind-up toys being brought mysteriously back to life. It’s clear that the Woman in Black (aka Jennet Humfrye) is stirring again, but boy does she take her sweet time about making a full-fledged appearance.

One thing can be said, about The Woman in Black 2: it’s not afraid to kill a few children. This PG-13 horror movie may be short on scares, but it’s not for lack of trying. The monster takes her ire out on wee lads and lasses more than any of the adults, which is bound to be disturbing to audience members who, like the heroine, are sympathetic to any child on sheer principle.

The rest of us – who require little things like “being interesting” to make us a give a damn about someone, regardless of their age – will probably find ourselves rooting for the villain to snuff these kids out as quickly as possible so that the adults, in the movie as well as in the theater, can get on with their lives.

Helming his second feature (after 2009’s well-received “The Scouting Book for Boys”), Tom Harper is one of that breed of British craftsmen directors for whom bombed-out period streets, smoky railway platforms and soggy marshes are what a bikini-clad girl in a Ferrari is to Michael Bay, and those visual gifts get a valuable aid here from cinematographer George Steel, who works from an even more monochromatic palette than the previous film, suggesting that wartime England was a virtually colorless world, save for articles of women’s clothing (which pop from the meticulously drab frames with an almost Technicolor intensity).

It isn’t just color that’s been drained from the movie, though. As the body count (finally) begins to rise and panic sets in, Harper manages a couple of reasonably jolting scares, mostly through shock edits and sudden shrieks on the soundtrack — or surges of the musical score credited to composers Marco Beltrami, Marcus Trumpp and Brandon Roberts.

But a truly memorable ghost story needs more than that, and “The Woman in Black” found it in Radcliffe’s anguished grace, and in the grief-stricken townsfolk living out their cursed existence. Nothing in “Angel of Death” tugs nearly so effectively at the heart — or, more importantly, the jugular.