The Herald - The Herald Magazine
A double shot of spirits
The Little Stranger, Monday, Film 4, 9pm
THERE have been so many adaptations of Sarah Waters novels they could form a mini-genre in their own right. Affinity, Tipping The Velvet and The Night Watch have all been made into TV series, as has Fingersmith, which was also transposed to 1930s Korea by Oldboy director Park Chan-wook for a coolly erotic big screen adaptation. Cinema is also the preferred vehicle for this 2016 take on Waters’ 2009 novel The Little Stranger, by Irish director Lenny Abrahamson.
Befitting his status as a filmmaker to watch – he was Oscarnominated for Room in 2016 – Abrahamson assembles a starry, actorly cast headed by Charlotte Rampling and Ruth Wilson as the imperious Mrs Ayres and her dutiful, no-nonsense, Labradortoting daughter Caroline.
Together with housemaid
Betty (Liv Hill) and Caroline’s disfigured, war hero brother Roderick (Will Poulter), they are the sole occupants of Hundreds Hall, the Ayres family pile in Warwickshire.
The year is 1947, the end of the age of deference is looming, the once grand aristocratic houses are crumbling (see Brideshead Revisited for more on that) and into the Ayres’s lives comes new GP Dr Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson).
He’s a local boy, as it turns out: his mother once worked at Hundreds Hall, and on a visit there for a country fair in 1919 he had an encounter with ramifications for what follows.
And what does follow? As in the novel, you’re never quite sure.
Themes of guilt, repressed memories and a sort of simmering class anger bubble away beneath, while on the surface a story plays out which appears to have some kind of haunting at its heart.
Roderick, a former airman who was badly burned in the war, somehow sets his bedroom on fire. A visiting girl is savaged by Caroline’s normally chilled pooch.
And Mrs Ayres becomes convinced the spirit of her daughter Suki is stalking the dilapidated old house. Suki died before Roderick and Caroline were born – but Faraday remembers her from his illstarred visit to Hundreds as a boy.
The stage is set, as they say. Everyone looks miserable and so does post-war England, shot by Abrahamson in a weary halflight and with a palette that runs from nasty brown to dull grey and back again.
Quiet, intense and enigmatic, The Little Stranger is a match for its source material, and in some places betters it.
The Mad Women’s Ball, Amazon Prime Now streaming
IF you’ve given up on Amazon’s flashy new sci-fi drama Chaos Walking (understandable: it’s an absolute car crash of a film) then try this thoughtful, if melodramatic, period piece from French actor-turned-director Mélanie Laurent, itself based on Victoria Mas’s best-selling novel of the same name.
Opening on the day of Victor Hugo’s funeral in Paris in May 1885 – an estimated two million people followed the coffin from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pantheon – it tells the story of high-born young woman Eugénie Cléry (Lou de Laâge), whose
life would otherwise be a round of upper-class tea parties and a ‘good’ marriage to a wealthy husband were it not for the fact she can communicate with the spirits of dead people.
These days such a talent would win you a Netflix series and a book deal.
In 19th century France it leads to the asylum: Paris’s notorious Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, to be exact.
Hospital here is a relative term, though. Treatments include being locked in a bath of ice water for hours on end, forced into isolation cells or, the fate of Eugénie’s friend Louise (Lomane de Dietrich), hypnotised in front of a room full of men and asked to touch yourself.
This scene is based on a famous painting by Andre Brouillet, A Clinical Lesson At Salpêtrière, which shows real-life neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (played here by Grégoire Bonnet) hypnotising real-life ‘hysteria’ patient Louise Augustine
Gleizes.
Imprisoned in her own way at Salpêtrière is Geneviève (Laurent herself), who runs the place.
Still mourning the death of her sister, Blandine, she is shocked when Eugénie claims to be able to communicate with her sibling.
Geneviève’s father, who has raised her to believe in science and the rational, won’t tolerate any mention of it, but Geneviève and Eugénie come to an accord – one which plays out at the annual Salpêtrière costume party, the so-called Mad Women’s Ball.
There are some troubling scenes in which the women are inflicted to degradation and mistreatment, though that’s sort of the point of the film.
What elevates it are the sumptuous interiors, the strong performances and a haunting soundtrack from Israeli composer Asaf Avidan.
Abrahamson shoots post-war England in a weary half-light and with a palette that runs from nasty brown to dull grey and back again