If you are reading this, there’s a good chance that you haven’t seen The Woman in Black 2 Angel of Death. That’s okay: neither have I, and I’ve watched it twice.
Tom Harper’s sequel to the bafflingly popular 2012 haunted house thriller The Woman in Black looks like it was shot using day-for-night photography, but at night. You can’t see a damned thing in this movie. I had to watch it again just to confirm that there wasn’t a problem with the theater’s projection equipment. A proper showman like William Castle would have advertised this as “Squint-O-Vision,” making the audience’s desperate and futile attempt to figure out just what the heck is going on a part of the gag.
But The Woman in Black 2 takes itself too seriously for that. It is a solemn attempt to eke proper dread out of a spooky-wooky house in World War II, populated by displaced British children and their schoolmarms and a vengeful ghost. They have little in the way of personality that doesn’t stem from either personal tragedy or the primitive needs of the plot. You spend the first third of this movie waiting for Doctor Who to show up and kick it into high gear, and the rest of it wondering why none of these people have found the doorway to Narnia yet.
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Because something – anything – needed to happen to make The Woman in Black 2 interesting, but it never does. Or maybe stuff was happening all the time and I just couldn’t tell because all the lights were off. In any case, the title specter torments a sensitive teacher (Phoebe Fox) and seemingly corrupts a young orphan (Oaklee Pendergast), who refuses to talk because it’s creepier to communicate in notes. “Are you scared yet? Check this box: Yes [ ] No [X].”
I’ll give The Woman in Black 2 one thing: it’s not afraid to kill a few children. This PG-13 horror movie may be short on scares, but it’s not for lack of trying. The monster takes her ire out on wee lads and lasses more than any of the adults, which is bound to be disturbing to audience members who, like the heroine, are sympathetic to any child on sheer principle. The rest of us – who require little things like “being interesting” to make us a give a damn about someone, regardless of their age – will probably find ourselves rooting for the villain to snuff these kids out as quickly as possible so that the adults, in the movie as well as in the theater, can get on with their lives.
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Despite the strong, gloomy set-up and a few decent actors in the cast (the adults all acquit themselves decently enough), The Woman in Black 2 just never comes into its own. It lacks the non-stop cheesy “boo” scares of the previous film, and it fails to develop the characters enough to make us invested in any of the subtler chills. Even if it had reached either end of that scary scale, it probably wouldn’t have mattered because you can’t make half the film out anyway.
The only reason I can think of for making a movie this hard to watch is a deep-seated belief that no one in the audience is going to care what’s happening on the screen, either because they’re too busy making out or just trying to sneak a 98-minute nap into their day. In either case, there are cheaper alternatives. Stay in, snuggle up, and save your money for a movie you can actually look at.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
