Movie Box Review

THE WOMAN IN BLACK is so aggressively old-fashioned it sometimes feels like the horror movie version of The Artist.  A haunted house story in the grand style, it may be in color and wide-screen, but its heart is with the black-and-white thrillers of an earlier age, and at a time when the genre seems interested in little more than shock-therapy soundtracks and extreme gore, its restraint can be charming. 

Jane Goldman's script (she's co-written most of Matthew Vaughn's movies, including Stardust, Kick-Ass and X-Men:  First Class), based on Susan Hill's novel, is set early in the 20th century, in a remote English village where the lady of the local great house has died.  London solicitor Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe, in his first significant post-Harry Potter role) is sent down to go through the dead woman's papers and set her estate in order.  Arthur is himself something of a wreck--his wife died in childbirth, and his grief threatens to estrange him from his young son.  

His troubles, of course, have only started.  Just about everyone in town makes it clear they don't want him there, he begins to learn about the dreadful secrets of the house's inhabitants, and when he insists on entering the old place to do his job, it turns out to be very much on the creepy side.  You name it:  locked doors that unexpectedly open, rocking chairs that rock intensely without anyone being seated, a very insistently loud crow, jnexplicable faces at the windows, and wouldn't you know it, a mysterious Woman In Black who appears in the family cemetery and then everywhere else.  Meanwhile, something terrible is starting to happen to the children in town.  

Director James Watkins embraces every creak, thump and roar of the old house, sometimes to a fault.  If you've ever seen a horror movie before, the long-silence-then-boo! moments become all too obvious and predictable when they're repeated a dozen times.  And although it's a time-honored cliche to have the protagonist wander alone through the thickly silent darkness of the haunted abode, that trope is also used here to the point of self-parody.  The movie could have used some modicum of a sense of humor, and a few more people on hand besides Radcliffe and Ciaran Hinds and Janet McTeer as a couple with very different views about the supernatural.  

Nevertheless, for the most part the movie works in its retro way.  Radcliffe proves he can hold the camera without spectacles, wand or forehead scar, and he's convincing as a young father.  The production design of the house and town (by Kaye Quinn) and the superbly atmospheric photography (by Tim Maurice-Jones) are marvelously dank, although Marco Beltrami's score is disappointingly obvious.  And the script has a few surprises in the late going, even if the final one is more fantasy than horror.  

The Woman In Black is one of the first new pictures made by the revivified Hammer studio, a new version of the company that produced many of the Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing British horror classics of the 1950s-60s.  Like it's forebears, it's a a solidly fun piece of unpretentious entertainment.

It takes about an hour, but Nicholas McCarthy's THE PACT, which premiered in the Park City At Midnight section at Sundance, eventually turns out to have a neat twist up its sleeve, one that switches the movie from haunted house horror to an entirely different subgenre of thriller.  And after that, a solid reel or so of scares and suspense kicks in, and the picture moves into another gear.

The question will be whether that's enough, given that the hour preceding the twist has been an exceedingly routine low-budget chiller, and that the ending afterward is a cruddy, obvious cheap-shock coda. 

The Pact is McCarthy's first feature, expanded from a short that previously screened at Sundance.  It's set mostly in and around a house where a single mother (of the sadistic variety, not the noble, self-sacrificing kind) raised 2 daughters, both of whom left town as soon as they were old enough.  When the story begins, mom has recently died, and a prologue mysteriously dispatches the older sister, herself a (much better) single mother, while having an ill-fated Skype session with her young daughter.  (This year's Sundance lesson of both The Pact and V/H/S:  stay away from Skype.)  This brings biker sister Annie (Caity Lotz) somewhat reluctantly to town, less to attend her mother's funeral than to find out what happened to her older sister.  We're immediately plunged into the world of inexplicable sounds, disquieting nightmares, unseen forces that fling our heroine against the walls, and shadowy was-that-really-there? figures.

All of this comes right out of the haunted house movie textbook, and McCarthy isn't a skilled enough filmmaker to hide the lack of production values.  Instead we get the usual silences leading to sudden musical and sonic zings, many lightbulbs that flare and then burst, and ghostly visitations.  Even lay-up set-pieces like the visit of an eccentric psychic (who Annie, in an unlikely development, knew in high school), offer minimal fun.  With the exception of Lotz (she played the niece of Don Draper's California "wife" on Mad Men), who has plenty of charisma as the Ripley-like Annie, the acting is for the most part wooden and subpar.

And then The Pact zigs when you expect it to zag, and McCarthy suddenly gets his directing feet under him for a few minutes.  It builds a lot of goodwill... which he then squanders with his dumb, predictable epilogue.  This leaves The Pact as a severely mixed bag, one that has its jolting moments, but doesn't deliver consistently or professionally enough to justify its festival berth.

The first inkling of just how deranged AMERICAN HORROR STORY is going to be comes with one of the early "normal" scenes.  The location isn't the haunted house, so we're away from the girl with Down's Syndrome who tells people they're going to die in there, the brutally murdered identical twins, the body parts and fetuses preserved in jars... I could go on. But at this point in the story, we're at the private high school where teen Violet (Taissa Farmiga, sister of Vera, who played the younger version of her sister in the recent Higher Ground) is merely smoking a cigarette where it's prohibited, and the local mean girls don't approve (one of their grandmas died of lung cancer).  Yet even this scene is staged with such intense, hyped-up rage that you might think a massacre is about to take place.  The message is clear:  Abandon restraint, all ye who enter here.

"Restraint" isn't a word associated with Ryan Murphy and his co-creator Brian Falchuk in any case (Murphy also directed the pilot)--whatever their strengths and failures, both Nip/Tuck and Glee have been all-in propositions, veering wildly from serious drama to wild perversity often in the course of a single episode.  Letting Murphy and Falchuk loose in the horror area is like granting them a license to kill, mutilate, and generally rampage.  American Horror Story, with its oddly emblematic title ("American" as opposed to what, exactly?  A Portuguese horror story?) embraces all the leeway the genre provides; watching it, you can almost feel Murphy and Falchuk exulting: Where has this genre been all my life?

On the most basic level, American Horror Story has a classic set-up:  the very troubled Harmon family moves from Boston to Los Angeles, where they buy a house with a history of terrible events.  (The gay couple who owned the house previously died in a murder/suicide, and that's just the beginning.)  Vivien (Connie Britton) had suffered an awful late-term miscarriage and hasn't been, psychologically or physically, the same since; after that, her psychiatrist husband Ben (Dylan McDermott) cheated on her with a 21-year old, Vivien walked in on them, and while the couple has remained together, they're completely estranged.  Violet is an outcast who hates LA and cuts herself, but she finds her life livened up when she meets Tate (Evan Peters), one of Ben's patients, who has elaborate fantasies about wreaking Columbine-type vengeance on his schoolmates and is also suicidal.  Plus there's the next-door neighbor Constance (Jessica Lange), mother of the Down's Syndrome woman who "has a way" of getting into the house even when all the doors are locked; Constance has some as-yet unclear involvement with whatever terrors the house contains.

There are many influences here, but the predominant one seems to be The Shining.  Like the novel and especially the Kubrick film, there's the general idea of a family's psychosexual dysfunction being absorbed and amplified by the evil spirits of their dwelling (just as Jack Torrance saw a beautiful, naked woman in place of a rotting corpse, when Ben looks at the elderly housemaid Moira, he doesn't see Frances Conroy, but rather the young, very sexual Alexandra Breckinridge).  More specifically, there's the suggestion that Ben will be coaxed by the house into trying to murder his family, which is apparently what happened to previous owner Larry Harvey (Denis O'Hare).

Luckily for American Horror Story, the genre doesn't require too much in the way of logic, which is typically a weak point for Murphy and his team.  On the other hand, it's very unclear how they're going to sustain this premise beyond a few episodes--after a certain point, there are only so many repellent, terrifying incidents the family can undergo before they'll seem like complete idiots for staying in the house.  For now, though, the show is quite compelling in its crazed way (it certainly isn't dull).  It's also graced by some terrific acting.  Even though Vivien is hardly comparable to Tami Taylor on Friday Night Lights in terms of depth or fullness, Britton brings the same kind of commitment and intelligence to the role, while McDermott, Farmiga, O'Hare, Peters, Conroy and especially Lange offer effective creepiness.

It remains to be seen whether American Horror Story will offer anything beyond superficial scares, let alone a coherent story or meaningful theme.  But the horror genre is, if nothing else, a flexible one, and cheap thrills can be satisfying too, if they're well done.  So far, the show is off to a darkly entertaining start.