Hammer
time
The
film for the most part starts out well: a trio of beautiful young
girls, all dressed up in lacy frills, gracefully step in lock-step
slow motion across the room and to the window (crushing a toy tea cup
on the way), where they promptly and unhesitatingly leap to their
deaths.
James
Watkins' 2012 adaptation of the 1983 novel by Susan Hill is the
latest in a long line. It has been turned into a 1987 stage play in
Covent Garden, where it vies with Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap
for the title of world's longest running play, and into a 1989 TV
movie with a screenplay by the legendary Nigel Kneale (The
Quatermass Experiment (1953), Quatermass and the Pit
(1958)). It's the latest product of the newly revived Hammer Films,
the same outfit that produced Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and The Horror of Dracula (1958), and for the most part, the film
takes on some of the pulpy Gothic spirit of those previous
productions and of the studio's early successes--an emphasis on light
and shadow, on atmosphere, on music and cunning sound
design, not to mention an insistence on setting not just as
background but as an important and active character. The moldering
house with its cavernous rooms are a triumph of production design,
filled to the rafters with unquiet furniture, heavy doors, intricate
dolls with mottled complexions and inscrutable expressions; the
surrounding land is if anything even more unsettling: towering
forests, vasts tidelands, a crooked cross standing on a bed of
thickest mud.
Enter
Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe); his wife has died in childbirth, and
his grieving mood has not endeared him to his law firm employers. If
he is to keep his job, he has to settle the estate of an old lady
client, whose properties include the Eel Marsh House, located on a
causeway off of the mainland (tides rise and cut off the road for
long periods of the day, increasing the house's already considerable
sense of isolation). The townfolk of nearby Crythin Gifford are no
help; their kids mostly watch Kipps from behind shut windows, and the
parents gang up on occasion in an attempt to drive him back to the
city from which he came.
The
picture relies on old-fashioned effects so much it's practically a
radical break from today's fashion in horror movies: it turns on the
ridiculous premise that mere sounds, the shift of shadows, and a few
imaginatively staged and photographed images are enough to scare an
audience to the edge of their seats. And for the most part, the
filmmakers are right: we are caught and held in thrall as Kipps comes
to the slow realization that something is very very wrong in not just
Eel Marsh House, but nearby Crythin Gifford as well; when he visits a
police station two young boys bring in their sister, who they say has
drunk some lye; the little girl dribbles bright thick blood down her
pale cheeks (think Freddie Francis, Hammer's great house
cinematographer, and his way with the color crimson) as she collapses in
Kipps' arms. Kipps later learns that every time the Woman is sighted,
a child dies.
Perhaps
the most disturbing effect of all is the simplest: the Dailys (Ciaran
Hinds and Janet McTeer), possibly the wealthiest couple in the
village and the only one who are civil to Kipps (they insist that he
stays at their house, and invite him to dinner). Problem is, the
Dailys are victim to the Woman as well; their only son drowned. Ms.
Daily tells Kipps over dinner that her son communicates with her by possessing
her body--she promptly falls off her chair and scratches out with a
knife on the wood of the dinner table the image of a hanged woman.
McTeer
gives an especially chilling performance: she captures your heart
with the quick and easy desperation of a mother grieving for her
child, then throws a terrifying
rendition of a seizure--you're not sure if it's a genuine fit or if
some demon has possessed her. It's like watching your dotty old
favorite aunt turn into Linda Blair with the snap of
one's fingers, just like that, spinning head and all.
And
just like that it all turns to dust. Watkins, presumably desperate to
cater to the younger crowd and unconfident of his already gorgeous
sets, music and camerawork, resorts to silly digital effects to up
the ante; the net result of this unfortunate effort is to trash
what Watkins has so carefully established beforehand--the sense of
dark mystery and sinister foreboding--in favor of cheap pop-up scares
and a silly digitized shrieking wraith. The collapse of this whole
impressively constructed and plausibly designed world into a silly
digitized mess happens with such speed and thoroughness one is left
stunned, and not in a good way. This well and truly is a horror film...just not the kind the filmmakers had intended.
First published in Businessworld, 2.9.12
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