Review of The Little Stranger (2018) by Bertaut1 — 26 Sep 2018

An "atmospheric chamber drama" without any atmosphere, and precious little drama.

The Little Stranger was a huge box office bomb ($417,000 gross in its opening weekend), and easily the weakest film in director Lenny Abrahamson's thus far impressive oeuvre. Based on Sarah Waters's 2009 novel, the story takes in Warwickshire, 1948. Dr. Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson) is a country physician obsessed with the opulent Hundreds Hall estate where his mother worked as a maid. However, by 1948, Hundreds is in a state of disrepair, with the Ayers family who own it are in serious financial trouble; Angela (Charlotte Rampling), matriarch of the dynasty, who never recovered from the death of her eight-year-old daughter, Susan; Caroline (Ruth Wilson), her daughter; Roderick (Will Poulter), Angela's son, a badly-burned RAF pilot suffering from PTSD; and Betty (Liv Hill), the maid. When Betty takes ill, Faraday is summoned, soon ingratiating himself with the family. However, as mysterious things start to happen, Angela becomes convinced the spirit of Susan is with them. Meanwhile, Faraday and Caroline become romantically involved.

Aspiring to blend elements of "big house"-based mystery narratives such as Jane Eyre (1847), Great Expectations (1861), and Rebecca (1938), with more gothic-infused ghost stories such as "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), The Turn of the Screw (1898), and The Haunting of Hill House (1959), The Little Stranger is not especially interested in the supernatural aspects of the story per se. In this sense, Abrahamson and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon have, to a certain extent, created an anti-ghost story, which eschews virtually every trope of the genre.

With this in mind, the main theme of the film is Faraday's attempts to ingratiate himself with the Ayers', to transform himself into a blue blood, with his commitment to his own upward mobility far stronger than his commitment to the Hippocratic Oath. He is immediately dismissive of the possibility of any supernatural agency in the house, and, far more morally repugnant, he does everything he can to convince those who believe the house is haunted that they are losing their minds.

However, for me, virtually nothing about the film worked. Yes, it has been horribly advertised, and yes, it is more interested in playing with our notions of what a ghost story can be, subverting generic tropes. I understand what Abrahamson was trying to do. The problem is that he also shuns the standard alternative to jump scares - creeping existential dread - and as a result, it remains all very subtle, and all very, very boring.

One of the main issues is Faraday's emotional detachment. I get that he's the ostensible villain, so we're not meant to empathise with him. However, Gleeson practically sleepwalks his way through the film, getting excited or upset about (almost) nothing. I know detachment is precisely the point, but, firstly, we've seen Gleeson play this character multiple times before - all brittle, buttoned-down intellectualism - and secondly, he comes across as more robotic than detached, and after twenty minutes, I was thoroughly bored of him, and just stopped caring.

Partly because of this, and partly because of the repetitive script, the film is just insanely and unrelentingly dull. Now, I don't mind films in which nothing dramatic happens, but in The Little Stranger nothing whatsoever happens, dramatic or otherwise. The pacing is absolutely torturous.

One thing I will praise unreservedly, however, is the sound design. For example, just prior to a dog attack, the sound becomes echo-like and the picture starts to move in and out of focus, as the camera shows Faraday in a BCU, suggesting he is becoming unglued from his environment. This also happens later on with Roderick, just prior to a fire. Perhaps the most interesting scene from an aural perspective is a scene near the end of the film. As Angela examines a room, the distorted and difficult to identify sound becomes deafening. However, as the other characters run through the house towards the noise, all sound is pulled out almost entirely, with only the barest hint of footfalls detectable. This is extremely jarring and extremely effective.

However, beyond that, this just did nothing for me; I didn't care about any of the characters, the social commentary was insipid and said nothing of interest, the supernatural aspects are so underplayed as to be virtually invisible, and, most unforgivably, the film is terminally boring.