W.I.B. 2. The Woman In Black: Angel Of Death

The woman in black is dancing with me

cheek to cheek

W.I.B. 2 is rubbish. It has no aliens, no ray guns, no Will Smith and no Tommy Lee Jones. Just some guff about kids in the war and a house on the marshes.

Do you know why 'The Woman In Black' is on the national curriculum? It's because it is an expertly crafted ghost story in the classical tradition that lends itself to a gripping, spooky and enthralling theatrical experience. The 2012 film adaptation was a slow burn of tension and drama wrapped up with some perfect gothic moodiness. It was smart and spooky and caught the public's imagination. It was haunting (every pun intended) and not exactly reassuring in its denouement.

All subtlety is brushed aside for  the sequel which is built around four unrelated jump scares and little else. The plot about a vengeful ghost terrorising evacuated children holed up in the sinister house on the marshes during World War Two plays like the obligatory "spooky" episode you will find in every season of Doctor Who . To be honest I kept drifting off. I didn't really know what was going on at certain points and didn't much care. There is plenty of atmosphere but it is all thrown away on silly "boo!" moments. Such moments always make you jump but there's not much skill involved. A loud noise and a kid wearing a gas mask suddenly appearing in frame is not the same delicious thrill that comes from the anticipation and dread of slowly crafted suspense. The film-makers can't even really figure out a good way to make the scares happen naturally out of the story and so there is an over-reliance on dream sequences and nightmares. The biggest scare in the film is the face of a passing nurse suddenly turning into that of a screeching ghost woman. This is the cinematic equivalent of those YouTube videos  where someone is made to stare at an innocuous maze on a computer screen for a while until a shock insert of Linda Blair in the 'The Exorcist' kicks in and makes them fall out of their chair. It's getting a reaction. It's not a story. The film ends on exactly this sort of lazy device at the expense of sensible resolution and structure. You leave feeling that you have been tricked.

The cinematography is wonderful (especially during the night-time sequences), I liked the wartime setting and for a moment there I thought we were going to get a fascinating black mirror version of Narnia. Unfortunately what we actually get is "'Annabelle' in a gothic house" with no creativity beyond thinking "this will look good in the trailer".

'The Woman In Black: Angel Of Death' - setting the bar low for horror in 2015