GHOST STORY OR TRUMPIAN ALLEGORY?
Director Lenny Abrahamson says we are living in a real-life horror movie
You might think that after getting an Academy Award nomination for directing Room, Lenny Abrahamson would be making more high-profile movies but the 52-year-old Dubliner has gone smaller, not bigger.
His latest movie is The Little Stranger, a hard-to-pigeonhole period drama set in post- Second World War England, starring Domhnall Gleeson as a doctor who becomes caught up in the creepy occurrences in Hundreds Hall, a decrepit mansion belonging to an aristocratic family on the decline. Based on Sarah Waters’ 2009 novel, the story centres on the budding romance between Gleeson’s Dr. Faraday, an ambitious commoner, and the family’s upper-crusty yet approachable daughter, Caroline (Ruth Wilson).
But is it a ghost story? Or an allegory of class resentment and paranoia?
We asked Abrahamson in a phone interview from New York:
Q What is The Little Stranger? Ghost story or big fat metaphor?
A It’s a ghost story to the extent that there’s a ghost implied in it. And it does certainly nod toward some of the classic ghost-story tropes: the big, crumbling house, strange goings-on, people beginning to get worried about it, and other people assuring them that there’s a rational explanation, etc. But it borrows from a much older tradition of literary ghost stories, which use the form to talk about Freudian ideas ...
Q Faraday, the film’s ostensible hero, is a bit of a stuffed shirt, and Caroline, a representative of the snooty aristocracy, is quite captivating. Who is the hero and who is the villain here?
A The hope is that by the end of the film, some of those categories will have dissolved a little bit. I’m always interested in stories where you encounter someone you think you understand but that you find harder to pin down at the end. What Faraday represents at the beginning is the rational guide that you get in stories about supernatural things ... By the end, it’s very difficult to keep people contained in the boxes you’ve put them in ...
Q The Little Stranger is only the latest of several films you’ve made based on books. Is there a danger, when translating written material to the screen, of the source material becoming too literal?
A There’s almost this extraordinary brutality to the process of literary adaptation. In the dance of literature, everything is hidden, unless the writer chooses to reveal it. In film, it’s the complete reverse. Everything is present, unless you hide it. The thing that film does have, which literature has to work so hard for, is the existential presence of things. Q Both Room and The Little Stranger use architecture in intriguing ways: as an existential presence, to use your phrase, as metaphor and to
enhance a mood of claustrophobia.
A I really like having a boundary. Like in Room, the physical setting helps you limit the massive set of choices that exist. But I’ve always been interested in the emotional effect of spaces ... When I started to write, I realized that the way I was constructing events was more cinematic than literary. How time passes in a room. How life ebbs and flows in a space. Hundreds Hall, though much bigger, is actually more claustrophobic than Room. Q This film takes place in 1940s England. And yet, as a metaphor for our world today ... A I know where you’re going with this.
Q ... Does it have anything to say about the current rise of populism?
A I think it does. It might feel like a bit of a stretch, but when there is this distinction being made between some people who are of value and those of less value, that leads to a degeneration, not only to those who benefit from that distinction, but to those who suffer from it. Faraday is a character who clings desperately to a kind of myth about himself. One could say that, at a societal level, not dealing with the truth, say, about the history of the United States — inequality, slavery, continuing racial injustice — and clinging to the myths of exceptionalism and the American Dream, you end up where you have the dream but it is just that: an empty dream.
Q Are you suggesting that The Little Stranger is really about Donald Trump?
A Everything is about Donald Trump. Or Brexit. Trump will eventually go, and there may be some serious damage that may take a long time to undo. But Brexit, in a way, is permanent, and that could ultimately lead to a disintegration of the European settlement. Why do we destroy the institutions that we took so long to build? The National Health Service and the BBC — they’re all under attack. Q Now, there’s a real horror movie for you. A I know. We’re living in one.
There’s almost this extraordinary brutality to the process of literary adaptation. In the dance of literature, everything is hidden, unless the writer chooses to reveal it.
LENNY ABRAHAMSON