This adaptation of Susan Hill's book made for television is not a big budget CGI fest and is all the better for it. Nigel Kneale's screen play has a delicate touch and allows us to be gently taken along as if ourselves are traveling like Mr Kidd in the train carriage and are placed in an otherwise sleepy little East coast village that has hardly acknowledged any change in a hundred years. Rather than a hammed-up Gothic caricature, this is presented in true Gothic style. We are aware of the absence of city noise, the sound of cars and trains replaced by silence broken by the cry gulls that can sound like the cry of a baby. Dark, fog shrouded days and chill, remote coastal nights. Rachel Portman's score weaves calmly but unnervingly through the sea mists accompanied by the desolate caw of raven and crow that hover over the tilted old headstones and low stone walls. The story is told at the pace of the world that was disappearing every where else at the beginning of the 20th century like a tale recounted by the fire late at night. It is a story of a young middle class man who, at ease with life and the developing new technology around him is suddenly taken out of this familiar environment and made to face the world where the curse of an evil woman still holds sway and kept watch for like sea frets and the danger of the marshes if traveling to the house that lays beyond them. This film begins by showing us an early twentieth century world that now,along with the railway has the motorcar and electric light. There is even featured an early recording device. However, out here in the house beyond the marsh, Mr Kidd knows that the rail tracks can only reach so far and the motor car is no good on the causeway, electric lights can fail. Then, like the eldritch façade of Eel Marsh House, like the devil standing upright in the day,an apparition of a woman dressed in black makes her claim and there is nothing to stand between him and the spectre that has haunted and terrified a generation. Then the darkness begins to fall. Adrian Rawlins is fine as the besieged and tormented Aurther Kidd but it is Bernard Hepton who steals this show as Mr Sam Toovey the rich businessman who befriends Arthur and becomes the steady rock amid the chaos. I believe this film is far superior to the new Daniel Radcliffe film adaption because of all the above. For me there are moments of genuine tension and one scene in particular that in-spite of my being a grown man, had my hair standing on end. We are treated here to a story being told like a tale by the campfire where, at the end of its telling, we perhaps hear something else amid the cry of the gulls and we are dared to peer through the windows of an old house in the marshes and maybe glimpse The Woman in Black. RH.
Film quote:'You're a brave lad and no mistake, but your not brave enough .no one could be.
Film quote:'You're a brave lad and no mistake, but your not brave enough .no one could be.