DIRECTOR Lenny Abrahamson follows up the confines of his Oscar-winning Room with this adaptation of Sarah Waters’s Man Booker Prize-shortlisted book.
Abrahamson has certainly moved on from the dark comedy of his surreal 2014 cult hit Frank to this atmospheric, horror-inflected mystery drama that provides an unsettling experience worth digging into.
Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson) is a doctor in post-Second World War England who sets up his practice in the countryside town where he grew up.
One day he is called to the nearby dilapidated estate home he greatly admired as a child to treat maid Betty (Liv Hill).
She has supposedly experienced some traumatising ghostly happenings.
He soon becomes fascinated with the house’s inhabitants; matriarch Mrs Ayres (Charlotte Rampling), her daughter Caroline (Ruth Wilson) and badly burned war veteran son Roderick (Will Poulter).
Faraday then begins a series of treatments for the physically and mentally anguished Roderick, while also striking up a relationship with the lonely Caroline.
The Little Stranger may be mis-sold as more of a horror than it is – many of the genre’s hallmarks are there, but the film seems to fight against outlandish tendencies.
It’s far more interested in the character and the fears and insecurities that plague them than cheap shocks, tuned to a more restrained pitch, deliberate pace and a soupy Gothic atmosphere that you could stir with a ladle.
Wilson is compelling as the world-weary daughter living in the shadow of her mother. Poulter avoids insensitivity with an affecting, tormented performance.
But it’s primarily a great showcase for Gleeson who puts in one of his best performances yet, steadily peeling away layers of a stuffy, repressed persona to reveal anxieties and desires once carefully hidden.
Although the mixture can be somewhat muted rather than truly impactful, it admirably grapples with everything from the male psyche to class tensions in post-war Britain.
Even when the convoluted machinations of the plot get the better of it, there’s an intriguing off-kilter flavour that carries you through its murky narrative waters.
Is there anything actually supernatural going on here? Or is it hysteria brought about by the weight of past actions and family tragedies?
Abrahamson plays around on that tightrope between the two, lending the drama an intriguing, haunting ambiguity until its satisfying final reveal.
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