Lenny Abrahamson (2018)
‘I didn’t set out to write a haunted house novel. I wanted to write about what happened to class in that post-war setting. It was a time of turmoil in exciting ways. Working class people had come out of the war with higher expectations. They had voted in the Labour government. They want change …. So it was a culture in a state of change. But obviously for some people it was a change for the worse …
I wanted the ghost story to be fairly subtle. The ghost stories that I’ve enjoyed are uncanny, unsettling and eerie more than they are about in-your-face pyrotechnics. I wanted it to be very based in the social context of the time, but for it to have this extra element of strangeness.’
This is Sarah Waters, in a piece in the Toronto Star, on writing her novel The Little Stranger (2009). Lenny Abrahamson’s screen version of the book, with a screenplay by Lucinda Coxon, seems well aware of Waters’s intentions. The film is a serious attempt to integrate social and sexual themes with gothic, supernatural elements, and holds your attention, but it’s increasingly unsatisfying.
The main action takes place in 1947, with flashbacks to 1919. The main location is Hundreds Hall, a Georgian manor in rural Warwickshire. The main character is Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson), a bachelor doctor who, in the year before the advent of the NHS, divides his time between general practice and hospital work. He is called to Hundreds Hall, where a young maidservant, Betty (Liv Hill), is reported to be unwell. As he approaches the house, Faraday encounters Roderick Ayres (Will Poulter), who had called for him and whose family owns the place. Roderick has a badly scarred face and moves with difficulty, legacies of the recently ended war, in which he served as an RAF pilot. An examination of Betty reveals nothing physically wrong. She admits to Faraday she doesn’t like the draughty, decaying house, where she’s the only member of staff, and was trying to convince people she was ill in order to escape it. The doctor encourages Caroline (Ruth Wilson), the unmarried daughter of the Ayres family, to make Betty feel more at home. In the weeks that follow, Faraday (he has no forename) repeatedly returns to the Hall, supervising Roderick’s medical care and enjoying the company of Caroline, whose only obvious emotional attachment is to Gyp, her elderly black Labrador retriever. In voiceover that announces the flashbacks, Faraday also recalls visiting Hundreds Hall once before, when he was nine years old. The Hall hosted an Empire Day party, the year after the Great War ended, for the local villagers. Faraday, the only child of working-class parents, attended in the company of his mother, who had once been a servant at the Hall.
From this opening, Lenny Abrahamson develops the film’s central relationship between Faraday and Caroline; illustrates the doctor’s continuing acute awareness of his humble social origins, as well as the economic and political climate in which the financially straitened Ayres sell the land surrounding Hundreds Hall for a housing development; and introduces the story’s ‘haunted house’ aspect. The last includes (inter alia) Roderick’s growing terror of a supernatural force he perceives to be active in the Hall and which hates him; servants’ bells that ring of their own accord; marks appearing on a skirting board; similarly puzzling, childish writing of the name ‘Suki’ on the walls of a deserted nursery upstairs. Faraday offers the family rational explanations as best he can: the marks and writing, for example, must have been there for years and never noticed before. His medical skills and his reassurances are not enough. Roderick becomes disturbed enough to be committed to a mental institution. The Ayres materfamilias Angela (Charlotte Rampling) is convinced that her long-dead daughter Susan, who was known as Suki, is communicating from beyond the grave.
Things reach a point where Faraday himself, as he confides to another doctor, is starting to wonder what’s going on. He speculates that what is known as poltergeist activity could actually be generated by a living person, when that person’s shadow side – their irrational desires and impulses – operate outside conscious control and as if autonomously. The flashbacks suggest that something of this kind may have happened when the boy Faraday (Oliver Zetterström) was briefly left to his own devices in Hundreds Hall. The meek-looking child, with sudden energy, breaks off an ornamental acorn from the frame of a grand mirror at the foot of the staircase. When his mother reappears and discovers what he’s done, she slaps her son hard and calls him a ‘vandal’. The title of the film gradually assumes a double meaning. It may refer to the weird force at work in the house, perhaps generated by the dead little girl. It could also apply to the young boy who, on Empire Day, entered a place where he didn’t belong – who was allowed inside Hundreds Hall only because one of her former colleagues among the staff there recognised Mrs Faraday, inviting her and her son into the kitchens. That young boy has become a man who, in spite of social elevation through professional success, still feels the stigma of his start in life. The quiet condescension shown towards him by characters like Angela Ayres and even his affable medical practice partner Granger (Harry Hadden-Patton) suggests Faraday may not be imagining that he’s still regarded as one of the lower orders.
Faraday is the first-person narrator of Sarah Waters’s novel. In spite of his voiceover and appearance in nearly each scene, not everything in the film reflects the doctor’s point of view or is mediated through him. This contributes, along with conventionally presented paranormal activity, to why the ghost story is not, as Waters meant it to be, ‘fairly subtle’. When, for example, Angela finds herself trapped in the spooky nursery, it’s hard to interpret the maelstrom she experiences as a product of her mind: she’s on the receiving end of standard poltergeist behaviour on screen. A more persistent problem is the cinematographer Ole Bratt Birkeland’s gloomy images of the house, inside and out. Apart from making some bits hard to make out at all, the bleak lighting, by throwing a pall over the place from the start, denudes it of mystery. Hundreds Hall is a million miles away from Bly in The Innocents.
Even so, in the early stages the rationing of incidents that seem explicable yet inexplicable is effective. Making an unusual attempt to socialise, the Ayreses invite a few people to dinner. Faraday is one of the guests, although he has to sing for his supper: when Roderick fails to appear, Faraday is instructed to make him change his mind. The doctor finds him in his room, drunkenly insisting that something bad will happen if he joins the company. The other guests include a young couple and their annoying, precocious daughter, who insists on playing with the good-natured Gyp. The moment when the dog, quite out of character, savages the child is genuinely shocking. As the film goes on, though, Lenny Abrahamson’s unimaginative realisation of the uncanny becomes a drag on his more interesting account of Faraday’s and Caroline’s doomed romance.
A main reason why it’s doomed is evident from Caroline’s behaviour when she and Faraday go to a dance together. Her promising career in the women’s army was cut short when Caroline was summoned home by her mother to look after Roderick. When someone she knew in the army unexpectedly appears, Caroline is instantly transformed – animated and laughing, both on and off the dance floor, where she partners the other young woman. ‘Nice to see Caroline out and enjoying herself,’ observes Granger to Faraday. On the way home, Faraday tries to make love to Caroline. Before long, she has scrambled out of the car and is running towards Hundreds Hall. Although she later agrees to marry him, it’s clear her heart’s not in it and she breaks off their engagement. It may be a fair reflection of the historical setting that Dr Granger’s remark at the dance is as close anyone in the film comes to voicing the word lesbian.
In the home straight, Abrahamson’s approach is half-hearted. Excitement remains in short supply but the director feels the pressure to explain things pyrotechnically, even while keeping them officially ambiguous. Waters’s socio-political themes have been virtually jettisoned but now, other than in the film’s ever-increasing implication that screwed-up Faraday is the source of the problems at Hundreds Hall. (The Suki side of things is, in effect, closed down by Angela Ayres’s suicide.) The climax takes place late at night, when Caroline is woken by the sound of repeated, rhythmical knocking; at the same time, Faraday, distraught at her rejection of him, sits in his car a little way from the house, compulsively (and rhythmically) beating against the upholstery. Caroline, moving from her bedroom onto the second-floor landing, appears to be drawn towards the source of the knocking. She stares at something, murmurs ‘You …’ and falls backward over the banister, to her death.
As in last year’s Goodbye Christopher Robin, Domhnall Gleeson gives an ambitious and unsuccessful performance. He again eschews obvious emotionality. The result is inexpressiveness, except that Faraday seems so miserable it’s incredible no one advises him to see a doctor. Although he’s actually about the right age, Gleeson also seems a bit young for the role – at any rate, he doesn’t come across as a man old enough to be already despairing of finding someone to relieve his isolation. Will Poulter plays Roderick intelligently but he too gives the impression, under his heavy scar-tissue make-up, of being too young. In her early scenes, Charlotte Rampling easily suggests a woman to whom there’s more than meets the eye but she doesn’t engage strongly with Angela’s increasing obsession. The best acting comes from Ruth Wilson, who gets inside the skin of the unhappy Caroline, by turns impatiently sarcastic and regretfullyt grateful to Faraday; and from Liv Hill, excellent and remarkably natural as Betty. The supple score is by Stephen Rennicks.
27 September 2018
