Horror falls flat

Talented cast left unfulfilled as gothic tale fails to connect

It’s tough to go wrong with a gothic horror film starring Ruth Wilson, Domhnall Gleeson and Charlotte Rampling — all wonderful character actors with striking features and second natures that seem to effortlessly lend themselves to the macabre and mysterious. And yet, Lenny Abrahamson’s The Little Stranger manages to waste them all.

With a simple, clichéd premise that has probably lost its lustre as a horror movie trope — a doctor visits a haunted mansion in 1948 England to see a patient, only to find her family’s troubled past may be intertwined with his — it’s a movie that barely moves. True to an English summer, every frame oozes a bleak dampness that could suggest a sense of foreboding, but instead emanates constant ennui.

The film is based on the Sarah Waters novel of the same name, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2009. The book benefited from a simple plot, using its extra space to develop the character of the family’s mansion: its lush, surrounding grounds are a moat of evil keeping watch, waiting to be let in.

As a movie, however, the tale of the haunted house carries too much history, and demands too much attention from the audience to be focused on the house itself. Neither a romance nor a man-child coming-of-age narrative can rival that focus, but nevertheless, The Little Stranger tries.

Borrowing enough to feel like a rough sketch of a potentially much better film, The Little Stranger does, at times, feel a little reminiscent of The Others, which did a far superior job of creating a sense of foreboding with such subtle terrors as a child under a sheet or faceless whispers. Even the more recently released Insidious, so tightly packed with tension, does a better job at making every minute feel scarier than the last.

The Little Stranger, with its fair share of screams, falls and lingering stares, attempts to meet this level of horror film. But unfortunately, it offers too little, too late.