A foreboding mansion with too many dark, empty rooms. A little girl’s death. A town doctor with a secret.
The Little Stranger arrives with all the necessary pieces in place to deliver a good, old-fashioned gothic ghost story.
But the latest film by director Lenny Abrahamson, whose 2015 art-house hit Room delivered Oscar gold for best actress Brie Larson, unfolds like a Merchant Ivory production of The Others, minus any legitimate scares.
It’s a gorgeously rendered, immaculately detailed period piece that remains as cold and uninviting as the bedside manner of its quasi-hero, Dr. Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson), who arrives one morning at Hundreds Hall to tend to a sick housekeeper.
Hundreds Hall once was the setting for lavish upper-crust parties thrown by the Ayres family, but by 1948, as the film opens, it has fallen into squalor, a tangible weight haunting the remaining Ayres bloodline, which includes matriarch Mrs. Ayres (Charlotte Rampling), daughter Caroline (Ruth Wilson) and disfigured son Roderick (Will Poulter).
Faraday has his own history with Hundreds Hall. His mother once worked there as a housekeeper, and he’s reminded of a childhood memory of being infatuated with a little blonde girl named Susan during his one visit to the manor with his parents in 1919. Susan, it turns out, never grew up. She died in the manor at a tender young age.
When he treats the young housekeeper, she shares a chilling story of unnatural goings-on inside the manor after dark. That’s just one of several allusions to a possible spirit haunting Hundreds Hall that are shared with Faraday throughout The Little Stranger.
At one point, after he quickly becomes a daily presence at the manor, and a possible paramour to Caroline, Faraday listens to Roderick tell him about “the thing” in the house that hates him.
And then, during a dinner party, a young girl playing hide and seek with the Ayres’ pet dog is viciously and mysteriously attacked.
All of this would be great if it actually amounted to anything, but Abrahamson seems more interested in creating mood and experimenting with period trappings than concocting an actual ghost story.
Gleeson, so good in Ex Machina and American Made, imbues Faraday with a clinician’s chilly, off-putting demeanor at all times, even when wooing Caroline. It’s nearly impossible to rally behind him, especially during the third act when Faraday begins acting erratically.
Wilson is much more successful as Caroline, who undergoes a believable transformation from awkward wallflower to refurbished socialite. And Poulter continues to grow as a character actor, adding The Little Stranger to his growing list of exceptional supporting roles.
The film is based on a novel by Sarah Waters, and it’s clear what screenwriter Lucinda Coxon hoped to achieve by adapting it. The Little Stranger is a ghost story, but it’s also a story of doomed existences.
The Ayres family is haunted by the past, by what Hundreds Hall once represented, and by how much has been lost.
Faraday too is haunted by what Hundreds Hall represented, but in a different way. For him, visiting the manor was like traveling to a strange and wonderful new world, full of promise and grandeur, that he might never again know. It’s as if a piece of him refused to leave.
Again, all of this would be great if it actually amounted to more than a not-so-spooky episode of Downton Abbey.
There’s a twist at the end, which I won’t spoil, but it falls near the low end of the Shyamalan Scale in terms of impact and predictability. You will likely figure it out too, well before the reveal.
The Little Stranger is successful in one regard:
I too felt haunted for several hours after the credits rolled, if only because I couldn’t shake the feeling that what I’d watched could have been so much more.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at bloodviolenceandbabes.com, on Facebook or on Twitter.
