For some actors, playing an iconic character can sometimes doom him or her into a career where they are constantly type cast or trying to avoid being type cast. Daniel Radcliffe starred in eight Harry Potter movies in a ten year period. It’s too soon to tell if he will be able to shake the audience perception that he is “the boy who lived”. So begins Radcliffe’s challenge, to prove he is more than just the boy wizard, Harry Potter. Good luck, dude.
In 2012, Radcliffe starred in “The Woman in Black”, a bleak ghost story thriller set in Edwardian England. Radliffe plays Arthur Kipps, a lawyer and father. His son is 4 years-old and always draws pictures of his dad, depicting him as ‘sad’. But Kipps is sad. His wife died giving birth to their son and he is haunted by visions of her death. Trying to overcome money problems, Kipps takes a last chance job with his firm to handle the estate of a woman who committed suicide following the death of her son, which she blames on the villagers. Everyone in the town believes the mysterious “woman in black” a spectral figure visits their children, convincing them to take their own lives as revenge.
“The Woman in Black” is a fairly decent ghost story. The old England setting helps greatly with the atmosphere, compared to some modern horror thrillers. It relies more on some old fashioned scary tactics to build tension and go for scares. The plot itself is really nothing special but is helped by some authentic casting. As for Daniel Radcliffe, it is a bit difficult to not think of this as the continuing adventures of Harry Potter– “Harry Potter and the Woman in Black”, perhaps? The first thing the dude does at the beginning is take a train to his destination, which while not out of the norm for the time period, really just plays like another trip aboard the Hogwarts Express.
However, Radcliffe is a fine actor and about halfway through this movie the story takes over and it matters less who is playing Kipps. The role itself doesn’t require a real stretch of acting skills anyway. This is a decent horror flick in an age when most go for loud scares or bloody gore to freak an audience. Watch at Halloween time or with the lights out and enjoy.
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