Monday 22 January 2024

The Little Stranger (2018 Lenny Abrahmson)

A perfectly well enough made and acted film, but the story is frustratingly without resolution. We think that repressed doctor Domhnall Gleeson is the reason tragedy comes to the crumbling aristocratic pile, and if not, it's the ghost of the malignant younger sister of Ruth Wilson who died there many years before. The screenplay is by Lucinda Coxon but we have to blame Sarah Waters, for this is a fairly faithful retelling of her novel, which she claimed to be about the social order changing post-War. Well, we got that, but try writing a decent plot. (The house represents the state of the nation, also.)

We seem in a bad run of films that we either can't finish or do but are left disappointed. And to think that Abrahmson made Room.

Photographed by Ole Bratt Birkeland, edited by Nathan Nugent, production design Simon Elliott.

With Will Poulter, Liv Hill, Charlotte Rampling.

I think actually Domnhall may have been miscast, or mis-directed. He's so inward, and his voice also has to carry the narration, that after a while it's a bit numbing.




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