Viewers hoping for a Woman In Black will be met with the fixed stare of Dr Faraday, however played with an unappealing rigidity by Domhnall Gleeson. The success of The Handmaiden, the last Sarah Waters novel to be adapted – or transformed – by Park Chan-wook, will add lustre to this project, coupled with Lenny Abrahamson’s cachet from The Room. Lenny Abrahamson’s sumptuous adaption has left it there for the viewer to trip over: is this a character drama with a wilfully oblique lead character? A ghost story about a dead child, but without a ghost? Abrahamson assembles all the ingredients for Turn Of The Screw suspense but never quite twists them with the dread that needs to seep through the halls of the central stately home. There’s a hole flowing through the novel which the writer Sarah Waters required the reader to fill with the full chill of their imagination. The Little Stranger is a deliberately crafted mystery. Downton be damned: even though a local village boy like Dr Faraday (Domhall Gleeson) can rise rapidly through the ranks to become doctor to the family who cling to The Hundreds, he can never break free of his chains.Ībrahamson assembles all the ingredients for Turn Of The Screw suspense but never quite twists them with sufficient dread

112 mins.ĭespite current waves of Brexit-y nostalgia, post-war Britain was indeed a harsh world to inhabit rationing, widespread poverty, and, in The Little Stranger, a threadbare landed gentry hanging on to the social pecking order in a decaying large house deserted by domestic help.

The little stranger book review