The Little Stranger

The Little Stranger is a little stranger than most horror films: It's more psychological drama and less shock. It's an understated nerve racker that eats away at your anticipation till you're a part of the haunted house that captures most entering it. A pleasant summer thrill.

Post WWII 1948, Dr. Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson) takes a call at Hundreds Hall, where mom was a maid and where the Ayres family is on its way to extinction, slowly and horror-film ominously. Yet there are no jump scares, no ugly beings, just the sense that things are not right, with a strange sound or rabid dog to keep the fans on edge.

As in Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, the Hundreds Hall's decay is figurative for the decline of family as well, no better example being the scarred and crippled Roderick (remember Roderick Usher?) from war, who is on the brink of letting the estate go to sale while he feels a bad karma in the house.

At the same time, faraday is telling us in flashback about his strange attachment to the estate from an early childhood party on its lawn after WWI, where celebrating the end of the war to end all wars introduced his working class sensibility to high class and a little girl who doesn't go away after she dies.

She seems to be the little stranger who still haunts Mrs. Ayres (Charlotte Rampling). At any rate, the film suggests an almost abnormal attachment by Faraday and a death struggling attachment by the rest of the family including his love interest, daughter Caroline (Ruth Wilson). From here the story takes some formulaic turns, no surprises.

Yet, The Little Stranger has a Brit restraint that lends itself some nice horror moments. Especially effective is director Lenny Abrahamson's, and his writers,' unwillingness to show too much or give answers even at the end. Classy little film.

This movie about a haunting may disappoint a lot of fantasy and horror buffs; no special effects, no appearance of a ghost, no gore (or so little) .Essentially an atmosphere movie, where a force (perhaps stemming from a child dead well before his age ) is slowly but inexorably doing away with the members of a doomed family; the son, a maimed disfigured fighter in the war,is broke and has to sell acres of his properties .

A doctor,a scientific mind ,does not believe in a curse ;when he was a child,he used to come to the castle in its heyday ; in love with the daughter,he tries to save her from a doomed fate ;the mother (a wonderful Charlotte Rampling,who really ages gracefully ) seems to live in another age .

Close to Henry James ' world, it's a movie which grows on you ,but it demands your undivided attention.

What can you say about a film that feels hours longer than it actually is? One thing I would declare without apology is that it better have a powerful resolution. In other words, a film that feels so arduous to get through better be that way for a good reason. Because if it doesn't have a solid payoff, then what was the point of making the audience sit through endless stretches of nothingness? That's what is done here too often.

A film that is sluggish, dour and interminable is not going to get much recognition for anything, even if the cast does a decent job. Here, Domhnall Gleeson is a British doctor who comes to an old estate owned by a wealthy aristocratic family, one that he came to know as a child. Gleeson does his best with the sandpaper-dry screenplay, but his efforts are for naught. Director Lenny Abrahamson appears to have taken too deliberate an approach. There's nothing wrong with a film relying on subtle horror, as this is based on a novel. The problem is, a big chunk of the film is so sedate that one will either be starved for interest by the time things pick up or will just plain want the film to end as I did. The film's lethargy made me check the time, something I never do anymore. It simply took too long for anything to happen here.

Notwithstanding my respect for the talent involved in this film, I decline to recommend it as it had me begging for the closing credits to run. An ending to a film has rarely felt so far away as it did here.

Slow burn, Lost interest at parts, Good Cinematography, Well acted, Confused at ending.

I'll be kind to this film in this respect: Lenny Abrahamson didn't set out to play by the usual (or at least de rigeur) rules that govern a lot of creepy-old house stories, as this is about 90% of the time a drama with some touches of very staid and not-all-there romance, and then in the last third he and his crew try their hand at a couple of sequences where some supernatural entity attacks a couple of the characters left in the Hundred's (sic) Hall in this small provincial English town (which you know is far from most civilization as characters talk of London like it's some far away distant land, and this is in the 1930's I think).

The studio who put this out may have been between a rock and a hard place: how to sell a movie that has the veneer of Gothic Horror, but doesn't have the passions of a Jane Eyre (I believe Focus Features, which also put out the 2011 Eyre, put this out too), or Crimson Peak (which I now love even more for just GOING FOR IT as far as a massively extravagant stylistic experience). And for some reason, perhaps due to the bankability(?) of Domnhall Gleeson - who I like a lot generally, especially now as General Hux in the new Star Wars - it was released on more screens than it should have been at an inopportune time. I wish it had done better in some capacity, maybe at an earlier time in the year when people might not be busy with the Back to School season, or with less awards-fare competition, but.... it may just be that it's "Alright" quality was going to leave it struggling. Not to mention that poster; like, what the hell IS that? Terrible.

Anyway, The Little Stranger isn't as dull as you've heard, at least if you stick with it past its opening half hour. Except for a somewhat nutty and make-up overloaded performance from Will Poulter, it starts off as dry as an eraser-board. Maybe some of it is due to the mood of this emotionally tight English feeling of the early 20th century, or the place this Hall is at in general, but it is hard to get into this mood at first with the color scheme on the gray side (which, yeah, again it is England on any given day, I get it). Once the plot really kicks in as far as it goes, that this Dr Faraday becomes ensconced with this family, most especially Ruth Wilson, and they showed a bit more of Faraday's backstory of his attachment (or his unspoken terror) of the Hall from when he was a boy, then I started to want to know more about what was going on and where it goes to.

And with Gleeson here, he's... good, but something I can't really vocalize or think right now holds him back somehow. That may be by design, either in the writing or from Abrahamson, but he is *so* reserved that you suspect he may be hiding something, until it is beyond the point of caring what it may be about. He may be both entirely right *and* entirely wrong for this part, if that makes sense, as a doctor who is supposed to ignite something in the Wilson character - will she leave this place, maybe marry, find some other path in life than staying in this house, and she actually has a more interesting arc in that respect than he does -but ultimately there's complications if nothing else from the Hall itself... or the perception of things going on in it. So I'm not going to say he's miscast, as he does what he can, but maybe it's some misdirection somehow, or that if there was something more in the book this was based on it never got off the page.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'll still be happy to see a performance from him that is just 'Okay' than by many others who don't rise up to the challenge. And Poulter, Wilson and Charlotte Rampling are all doing excellent work from what they're given (Wilson particularly near the end reminded me why I grew fond of her difficult character on The Affair). And the Hall itself can't help but he an intriguing location to shoot in. However, when this reaches into its last third, I can't help but feel its dips into horror take away from what would be a more... I'm not sure, emotionally complex given how much the filmmakers try to make it more about the characters than about the kind of schlocky jump scare horror effects that go out to the popcorn audiences. In other words, I get why it does become a horror movie in its last third, but something feels lost in the process.

This may seem like a higher star rating than it deserves, but I didn't dislike this film. I think Abrahamson is too skilled at making good scenes and some impactful images (i.e. Poulter burning that bookcase, the dance scene) for it to be a total disappointment. That said, after the one-two punch of ROOM and the underrated rock and roll trip FRANK, it feels like a step down in some way that's hard to articulate even after stepping out of the theater.