The Little Stranger ** (2018, Domhnall Gleeson, Ruth Wilson, Charlotte Rampling, Will Poulter) – Movie Review

Caught between an art film and a chiller movie, director Lenny Abrahamson’s 2018 The Little Stranger is well enough made but clumsy, clichéd and amateurish. On the chiller side, it doesn’t work either as psychological thriller or a haunted house movie or as a ghost story, but as an art film it is slightly better, along the lines perhaps of The Go-Between.

Stuck with a phony period English accent and a silly moustache, and a character so stuffy be seems to be based on a waxworks model, Domhnall Gleeson is miscast and ill at ease as Faraday, a country doctor who is called in summer 1948 to visit a patient – the war-afflicted Roderick Ayres (Will Poulter) – at crumbling manor house Hundreds Hall, where strange things incredibly slowly begin to occur. Unfortunately things are not strange enough to be chilling, nor hardly even interesting.

Faraday’s mother once worked as a housemaid at the house, home to the Ayres family for more than two centuries, but now in desperate decline, along with its inhabitants – matriarch (Charlotte Rampling) still troubled by the death of her beloved daughter Susan many years ago, son Roderick and caring surviving daughter Caroline (Ruth Wilson). The trio are clearly haunted. But by what?

Abrahamson occasionally conjures up an ominous mood and a sense of mounting mystery, and turns in a smart film, with a creepy score (by Stephen Rennicks) matching a creepy old house, and attractive cinematography by Ole Bratt Birkeland. But the desperately slow-moving, talky screenplay by Lucinda Coxon (The Danish Girl) fails to bring any excitement out of Sarah Waters’s original graphic novel.

Poulter’s weakly written role is sidelined and he has to act under acres of makeup, so there is  nothing he can do. Rampling can’t do anything either with the matriarch role when a grandly eccentric actress like Martita Hunt in Great Expectations is needed. And, with Gleeson struggling to establish his character, that leaves only Ruth Wilson to deliver the film’s one good performance. For that, at least, many thanks.

This is quite a fall for Abrahamson after the heights of Room.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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