The Woman in Black (2012)

Voldermort would shit his robe. In “The Woman in Black,” Harry Potter himself Daniel Radcliffe is an early 1900s widowed father/ greenish solicitor sent on a miserable errand: Close out the estate of an old woman who left behind a decrepit English mansion and “Hoarders”-worthy piles of papers. How very Jonathan Harker. Eel Marsh House (!) is built on high land regularly made an island during high-tide, set apart from a town where our hero learns much quickly: He is not welcomed, every parent has lost a child, and the manor is full of vile noises and visions. This is an old–school haunted-house yarn, based not on a book written by Poe, but one certainly written with the old master in mind. Radcliffe does well playing a young man raised to believe in God, but not ghosts, and stricken to see much of the latter, but never the former. Director James Watkins has washed out almost all color and light, so any bright signs must not be trusted. The house moans, shadows creep, and ghostly faces appear out of thin air, making the audience jump and scream, and then laugh. A-