The Woman in Black: Review By ROFLitschristian

The Woman in Black. If you've been an average user here on Movieweb you'd know that I have been super pumped for The Woman in Black. So I kept my promise and I was there after Chronicle. With Chronicle being superb earlier that day, I was highly anticipating for another movie that the trailers alone made me pee. I was also excited because the theater I caught the film in was the same theater I finished my Harry Potter journey in. So I caught the 7 o' clock showing with a full house and more excitement than a kid in a candy store. So how was it? Well...

The Woman in Black focuses on Arthur Kipps, a young lawyer in London whom lives with his son and nanny. Under stress after his wife's death and because of debt, Kipps is assigned a job to handle the estate of the now deceased Alice Drablow whose son died a while ago in marshland. And the town Kipps is in is really effing weird. There are children dying almost every day. If the film isn't scary with fear, it's surely scaring with the loss of children.

So Kipps goes to the Drablow home to work but then footsteps start to be heard. It is the woman in black. And as you can guess, the woman terrorizes Kipps while he's there and he becomes more focused with getting rid of her in order to finish his job. Kipps discovers all these birthday letters to Drablow's son, Nathaniel. They're from Nathaniel's biological mother Jennet who, considered mentally unstable, lost her son to her sister Alice. This gives us the woman's motive, revenge. It's a good story that just wasn't executed very well.

It's hard to rate the acting in this film because most of it is just Daniel Radcliffe running around the house either looking for or running away from the woman. Radcliffe is very underused in the film. And the fact that everyone kept making jokes about why Harry Potter didn't just do this completely ruins it.

The only other main character is Sam Daily, played by Ciarán Hinds. The only real support Sam gives is that he too knows why the children are committing suicide in the town. He help Kipps to stop the woman and that's about it.

Overall, The Woman in Black is by no means bad or boring, it's just not very good or ever used to it's full potential. James Watkins could've made so much more out of the film. There aren't any real scares but it is haunting. There aren't any real characters other than Kipps who then isn't really developed well. A film that looked to separate itself from this sh*tfest of horror movies does separate but not by much. It replaces gore with suspense which I'd praise more if it was suspenseful. It's a good start for Radcliffe's post-Potter career but it'll take more than this. The Woman in Black gets 2.5 children jumping out of windows out of 5.