Daniel Radcliffe is Arthur Kipps a widowed father and lawyer who is struggling to make ends meet. He is instructed by his employer to head to the village of Crythin Gifford in order to take control of the sale of Eel Marsh house and any other deeds left behind by the deceased owner Alice Drablow (Alisa Khazanova), so he decides to make the most of the situation and asks his nanny (Jessica Rane) to follow him to Eel Marsh in a few days with his son Joseph (Misha Handley) in order to allow them to spend a weekend from their normal routine. But when he arrives he finds the local population less than friendly towards him and the only person who seems to show him any courtesy is a local wealthy landowner Samuel Daily (Ciaran Hinds)

Unfortunately for Arthur the house and estate have a unhappy history and once he enters the house to survey the situation he begins to hear strange noises, notices a spectral figure and other visions of previous events. When he reports this to the local police office he is dismissed and some locals warn him off speaking about what he thought he seen. When a local child ingests lye and dies Arthur is blamed for speaking about the woman he seen but Arthur is not accepting of this so he begins to investigate the house and it’s contents but soon find that there is more to the situation than it seems so he must try and uncover the truth before the Woman In Black takes her revenge on any more children in the village or his own son.

In what was his first role after he completed the Harry Potter movies it is a little hard to buy Radcliffe as a widowed parent (he was twenty two at the time) which takes away from his character and while he does an alright job he seemed to lack the on screen presence to play the role of a man fighting against the struggles of being a single parent who is financially troubled and is battling a village of people who do not want him around. Where this movie does benefit is from director James Watkins excellent use of settings, the movie is constantly dark, raining, foggy. The ominousness of the situation even away from the house is palpable. But the house itself is the real star, it’s like mixing the house from The Amityville Horror with Frankenstein’s Castle, full of shadows constantly shifting, sometimes naturally, most times unnaturally, locked doors which are then suddenly open, noises from behind the walls all brought together by The Woman In Black who patrols the corridors, waiting for her opportunity to be released.

While there are enough jump scares to warrant the horror movie genre placement it felt more like a period piece ghost story and, while it’s a decent movie, there’s not a lot to set it apart from the rest of the pack.

DJ Speaks Rating: 4.5 Out Of 10