Warning: some spoilers! Paging Guillermo del Toro to give lessons on how to do a ghost movie! The Woman in Black’s atmosphere is perfect–you will be startled; the Edwardian period is seamless and the permeable layer of reality between the living & the dead is there. The problem is the story–I wasn’t familiar with the original story, but after the film, I decided to do a little research to figure out why the story fell short for me. First, how many times do I need to be startled in the same way–cut some of the scares. Second, instead of giving breadcrumbs to the audience so we could slowly determine the cause of the town’s troubles, there is an information dump after the majority of the scares. Third, the scares are repeated, not intensified, after the big reveal, which ultimately hurts the pacing of the movie and leads to boredom. Finally, the big reveal as to the cause of the town’s troubles isn’t as clear in the movie as the original story which alludes to punishing women’s sexuality, legalized kidnapping and more systematic institutional oppression which explains the general vengefulness of the ghost. Bringing out that side of the story would have brought teeth to essentially empty scares and would have provided an excellent counterpoint to the end as opposing single parent/gendered narratives. Daniel Radcliffe does a terrific job & I wish that he would get all the jobs that Robert Pattinson, that one expression wonder, gets. (And I never watched Harry Potter).