The Little Stranger

What can you say about a film that feels hours longer than it actually is? One thing I would declare without apology is that it better have a powerful resolution. In other words, a film that feels so arduous to get through better be that way for a good reason. Because if it doesn't have a solid payoff, then what was the point of making the audience sit through endless stretches of nothingness? That's what is done here too often.

A film that is sluggish, dour and interminable is not going to get much recognition for anything, even if the cast does a decent job. Here, Domhnall Gleeson is a British doctor who comes to an old estate owned by a wealthy aristocratic family, one that he came to know as a child. Gleeson does his best with the sandpaper-dry screenplay, but his efforts are for naught. Director Lenny Abrahamson appears to have taken too deliberate an approach. There's nothing wrong with a film relying on subtle horror, as this is based on a novel. The problem is, a big chunk of the film is so sedate that one will either be starved for interest by the time things pick up or will just plain want the film to end as I did. The film's lethargy made me check the time, something I never do anymore. It simply took too long for anything to happen here.

Notwithstanding my respect for the talent involved in this film, I decline to recommend it as it had me begging for the closing credits to run. An ending to a film has rarely felt so far away as it did here.

I remember when I first saw Paul Thomas Anderson's Puro vicio (2014) (which I loved), a colleague of mine (who hated it) was unable to grasp why I had enjoyed it so much. I tried to explain that if he had read Thomas Pynchon's 2009 novel, he'd have appreciated the film a lot more, to which he posited, "one shouldn't have to read the book in order to appreciate the film." I think I mumbled something about him being a philistine, and may have thrown some rocks at him at that point. So imagine my chagrin when I watched the decidedly underwhelming The Little Stranger, a huge box office bomb ($417,000 gross in its opening weekend in the US), and easily the weakest film in director Lenny Abrahamson's thus far impressive oeuvre. You see, I really disliked it, but the few people I know who have read Sarah Waters's 2009 novel (which I have not), have universally loved it, telling me I would have liked it a lot more if I was familiar with the source material. To them, I can say only this - "one shouldn't have to read the book in order to appreciate the film." It seems my colleague was right after all. I hate that.

Warwickshire, England, 1948. Dr. Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson) is a country physician obsessed with the opulent Hundreds Hall estate, owned by the aristocratic Ayers family, where his mother worked as a maid. However, by 1948, Hundreds is in a state of disrepair, with the Ayers in serious financial trouble. The house is now home to only four people - Angela Ayers (Charlotte Rampling), matriarch of the Ayers dynasty, and who never recovered from the death of her eight-year-old daughter, Susan; Caroline (Ruth Wilson), her daughter; Roderick (Will Poulter), Angela's son, a badly-burned RAF pilot suffering from PTSD; and Betty (Liv Hill), the maid. When Betty takes ill, Faraday is summoned, soon ingratiating himself into the family, and becoming a semi-permanent presence in Hundreds. However, as mysterious things start to happen, Angela becomes convinced the spirit of Susan is with them. Meanwhile, Faraday and Caroline become romantically involved.

Aspiring to blend elements of "big house"-based mystery narratives such as Jane Eyre (1847), Great Expectations (1861), and Rebecca (1938), with more gothic-infused ghost stories such as "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), The Turn of the Screw (1898), and The Haunting of Hill House (1959), The Little Stranger is not especially interested in the supernatural aspects of the story per se. In this sense, Abrahamson and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon have, to a certain extent, created an anti-ghost story which eschews virtually every trope of the genre. More a chamber drama than anything else, the film has been done absolutely no favours whatsoever by its trailer, which emphasises the haunted house elements and encroaching psychological dread. Indeed, to even mention the supernatural elements at all is essentially to give away the last 20 minutes of the film, as this is where 90% of them are contained.

The main theme of the film is Faraday's attempts to ingratiate himself with the Ayers family, to transform himself into a fully-fledged blue blood, even when doing so goes against his medical training; his commitment to his own upward mobility is far stronger than his commitment to the Hippocratic Oath. He is immediately dismissive of the possibility of any supernatural agency in the house, and, far more morally repugnant, he does everything he can to convince those who believe the house is haunted that they are losing their minds, that the stress of what has happened to the family has pushed them to the point of a nervous breakdown. He's also something of a passive-aggressive misogynist, telling Caroline, "you have it your way - for now", and "Darling, you're confused". For all intents and purposes, Faraday is the villain of the piece, which is, in and of itself, an interesting spin on a well-trodden narrative path.

However, for me, virtually nothing about the film worked. Yes, it has been horribly advertised, and yes, it is more interested in playing with our notions of what a ghost story can be, subverting and outright rebelling against the tropes of the genre. I understand what Abrahamson was trying to do, however, so too does The Little Stranger shun the standard alternative to jump scares - creeping existential dread - and as a result, it remains all very subtle, and all very, very boring - the non-supernatural parts of the story give us nothing we haven't seen before, and the supernatural parts simply fall flat.

One of the main issues for me is Faraday's emotional detachment. I get that he's the ostensible villain, so we're not meant to empathise with him, and, as an unreliable narrator, his very role is to objectively undermine the subjective realism of the piece. However, Gleeson practically sleepwalks his way through the entire film, getting excited or upset about (almost) nothing; on a stroll through the estate with Caroline, she apologises for dragging him out into the cold, and he replies, "Not at all. I'm enjoying myself very much", in the most dead-tone unenthusiastic voice you could possibly imagine, sounding more like he is having his testicles sandpapered. So I know detachment is precisely the point, but, firstly, we've seen Gleeson play this exact same character before - all brittle, buttoned-down intellectualism - and secondly, he comes across as more robotic than detached, and after twenty minutes, I was thoroughly bored of him, and just stopped caring.

Partly because of this, and partly because of Coxon's repetitive script, the film is just insanely and unrelentingly dull. Now, I don't mind films in which nothing dramatic happens (The Rider (2017), which barely even has a plot, is one of my films of the year), but in The Little Stranger nothing whatsoever happens at all, dramatic or otherwise. Instead, the script just goes round and round, through the motions; "this house is haunted" - "no, you're just tired" - "you're probably right" - "I am, have a lie down" - "okay. Wait, this house is haunted" - "no, you're just tired", etc.; wash, rinse, repeat. The pacing is absolutely torturous, and I certainly envy anyone who was able to get more out of the narrative than the opportunity to take a nap.

One thing I will praise unreservedly is the sound design. Foregrounded multiple times, this aspect of the film often becomes more important than the visuals. For example, sound edits often bridge picture edits in both directions (L Cuts and J Cuts). Similarly, we repeatedly experience the sound of one scene carrying over into the image of another well beyond the edit itself, so much so that it becomes a motif, suggesting a distortion of reality. Just prior to a dog attack, the sound becomes echo-like and the picture starts to move in and out of focus, as the camera shows Faraday in a BCU, suggesting he is becoming unglued from his environment. This also happens later on with Roderick, just prior to a fire. Perhaps the most interesting scene from an aural perspective is a scene in the nursery near the end of the film. As Angela examines the room, the distorted and difficult to identify sound becomes unrelenting (it is easily the loudest scene in the film). However, as the other characters run through the house towards the noise, all sound is pulled out almost entirely, with only the barest hint of footfalls detectable. This is extremely jarring and extremely effective, working to emphasise the dread all of the characters are by now feeling.

However, beyond that, this just did nothing for me; there was nothing I could get my teeth into, I didn't care about any of the characters beyond the first half hour, the social commentary was insipid and said nothing of interest, the supernatural aspects are so underplayed as to be virtually invisible, and, most unforgivably, the film is terminally boring. Maybe if I'd read the book...

The Little Stranger is a little stranger than most horror films: It's more psychological drama and less shock. It's an understated nerve racker that eats away at your anticipation till you're a part of the haunted house that captures most entering it. A pleasant summer thrill.

Post WWII 1948, Dr. Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson) takes a call at Hundreds Hall, where mom was a maid and where the Ayres family is on its way to extinction, slowly and horror-film ominously. Yet there are no jump scares, no ugly beings, just the sense that things are not right, with a strange sound or rabid dog to keep the fans on edge.

As in Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, the Hundreds Hall's decay is figurative for the decline of family as well, no better example being the scarred and crippled Roderick (remember Roderick Usher?) from war, who is on the brink of letting the estate go to sale while he feels a bad karma in the house.

At the same time, faraday is telling us in flashback about his strange attachment to the estate from an early childhood party on its lawn after WWI, where celebrating the end of the war to end all wars introduced his working class sensibility to high class and a little girl who doesn't go away after she dies.

She seems to be the little stranger who still haunts Mrs. Ayres (Charlotte Rampling). At any rate, the film suggests an almost abnormal attachment by Faraday and a death struggling attachment by the rest of the family including his love interest, daughter Caroline (Ruth Wilson). From here the story takes some formulaic turns, no surprises.

Yet, The Little Stranger has a Brit restraint that lends itself some nice horror moments. Especially effective is director Lenny Abrahamson's, and his writers,' unwillingness to show too much or give answers even at the end. Classy little film.

Slow burn, Lost interest at parts, Good Cinematography, Well acted, Confused at ending.

I'll be kind to this film in this respect: Lenny Abrahamson didn't set out to play by the usual (or at least de rigeur) rules that govern a lot of creepy-old house stories, as this is about 90% of the time a drama with some touches of very staid and not-all-there romance, and then in the last third he and his crew try their hand at a couple of sequences where some supernatural entity attacks a couple of the characters left in the Hundred's (sic) Hall in this small provincial English town (which you know is far from most civilization as characters talk of London like it's some far away distant land, and this is in the 1930's I think).

The studio who put this out may have been between a rock and a hard place: how to sell a movie that has the veneer of Gothic Horror, but doesn't have the passions of a Jane Eyre (I believe Focus Features, which also put out the 2011 Eyre, put this out too), or Crimson Peak (which I now love even more for just GOING FOR IT as far as a massively extravagant stylistic experience). And for some reason, perhaps due to the bankability(?) of Domnhall Gleeson - who I like a lot generally, especially now as General Hux in the new Star Wars - it was released on more screens than it should have been at an inopportune time. I wish it had done better in some capacity, maybe at an earlier time in the year when people might not be busy with the Back to School season, or with less awards-fare competition, but.... it may just be that it's "Alright" quality was going to leave it struggling. Not to mention that poster; like, what the hell IS that? Terrible.

Anyway, The Little Stranger isn't as dull as you've heard, at least if you stick with it past its opening half hour. Except for a somewhat nutty and make-up overloaded performance from Will Poulter, it starts off as dry as an eraser-board. Maybe some of it is due to the mood of this emotionally tight English feeling of the early 20th century, or the place this Hall is at in general, but it is hard to get into this mood at first with the color scheme on the gray side (which, yeah, again it is England on any given day, I get it). Once the plot really kicks in as far as it goes, that this Dr Faraday becomes ensconced with this family, most especially Ruth Wilson, and they showed a bit more of Faraday's backstory of his attachment (or his unspoken terror) of the Hall from when he was a boy, then I started to want to know more about what was going on and where it goes to.

And with Gleeson here, he's... good, but something I can't really vocalize or think right now holds him back somehow. That may be by design, either in the writing or from Abrahamson, but he is *so* reserved that you suspect he may be hiding something, until it is beyond the point of caring what it may be about. He may be both entirely right *and* entirely wrong for this part, if that makes sense, as a doctor who is supposed to ignite something in the Wilson character - will she leave this place, maybe marry, find some other path in life than staying in this house, and she actually has a more interesting arc in that respect than he does -but ultimately there's complications if nothing else from the Hall itself... or the perception of things going on in it. So I'm not going to say he's miscast, as he does what he can, but maybe it's some misdirection somehow, or that if there was something more in the book this was based on it never got off the page.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'll still be happy to see a performance from him that is just 'Okay' than by many others who don't rise up to the challenge. And Poulter, Wilson and Charlotte Rampling are all doing excellent work from what they're given (Wilson particularly near the end reminded me why I grew fond of her difficult character on The Affair). And the Hall itself can't help but he an intriguing location to shoot in. However, when this reaches into its last third, I can't help but feel its dips into horror take away from what would be a more... I'm not sure, emotionally complex given how much the filmmakers try to make it more about the characters than about the kind of schlocky jump scare horror effects that go out to the popcorn audiences. In other words, I get why it does become a horror movie in its last third, but something feels lost in the process.

This may seem like a higher star rating than it deserves, but I didn't dislike this film. I think Abrahamson is too skilled at making good scenes and some impactful images (i.e. Poulter burning that bookcase, the dance scene) for it to be a total disappointment. That said, after the one-two punch of ROOM and the underrated rock and roll trip FRANK, it feels like a step down in some way that's hard to articulate even after stepping out of the theater.