I was the only person in the theater for this movie. Since I started going to the movies every week in August 2014, this is only the third time that that’s happened (the other two such cases being Tusk and The Disappointments Room). I only first heard of this film last week when I saw the trailer for it in front of Searching and the trailer made it look like a horror movie, which meant that I had to see it. That trailer was a lie. This isn’t a horror movie, unless you have an odd phobia of stuffy English people sitting in parlors and drinking tea. If that’s the case, welcome to your fucking nightmare.
A doctor visits a mansion in the English countryside in the years after World War I (that’s something of a guess, they refer to it as The Great War). He treats a child that’s faking sick and then continues visiting the house for no real reason other than the fact that he was there once as a child and liked it. The house’s occupants are an old-money family and the house has fallen into disrepair from negligence. Then, um, not much happens. They throw some parties and there is some arguing over selling the property. Eventually the filmmakers remembered that this is a ghost story in the last half hour and put a ghost in it. Kind of. If you’ve seen the trailer, the bells ringing and the door slamming shut are the entirety of the supernatural happenings in the film. A ghost of a little girl seems to be behind it. Maybe. Not sure why. Don’t really care.
I thought that this was going to be a subtle, old-school haunted house movie like The Haunting. Nope. The horror in this film is so subtle that it isn’t even there. I’m not exaggerating. There isn’t a villain in this movie. There isn’t really even a central conflict or driving narrative. It’s basically just a slice-of-life film about really boring people and that’s a pretty goddamn tedious way to spend two hours. This is a meandering, agonizingly boring slog of a film that heads in no particular direction and succeeds in never arriving anywhere. One could argue that this is about the changing social class landscape of Europe after the war. I would argue that its still fucking boring and shouldn’t have been advertised as a horror film just because a frigging door slams shut. I’m honestly amazed that this isn’t receiving critical buzz for a Best Picture nomination. It’s that fucking boring.
It’s not all bad, though. It is a beautiful looking film. If you really like cinematography, it might be worth a look. The performances are also very good despite the fact that the characters have little material to work with. The only actor that I recognized was Will Poulter (from the Maze Runner movies), but all of the actors do a commendable job of emoting story points that the script itself forgot to articulate. But, no matter how good a film is on a technical level, I still expect a story to happen at some point. I feel as though the plot of this film stood me up. I was all ready and waiting to go out with it, but the damn thing never showed up.
This is a short review because I can’t muster the enthusiasm to say anything else and nobody cares about this thing anyway. I can’t believe that you’re even still reading this (thanks, though). I’ll close with the same advice that I gave to the cleaning crew as I walked out of the theater: Don’t bother.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Stranger_(film)#/media/File:The_Little_Stranger_(film).png
