Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Ruth Wilson, Will Poulter, Charlotte Rampling, Josh Dylan, Katie Phillips, Anna Madeley, Camilla Afwedson, Tim Plester, Dixie Egerickx, Darren Kent, Amy Marston, Lorne MacFadyen, Thea Balich, Alison Pargeter, Tipper Seifert-Cleveland, Sarah Crowden, Liv Hill, Kathryn O’ Reilly, Oliver Zetterstrom, Martin Carroll.
The potential of making one feel invisible is for some an intoxicating power that they cannot explain, whether in the individual, or in a section of society, you manage to cut people out of the picture, make them less than wanted, needed, you find you have the control over their very actions and standing in life, it is a dominance that is at first perhaps done out of neglect, but then you find that it is easy to make it seem as they don’t matter in the eyes of anyone else, they become a silence, a whisper only heard in small corners, the scratch upon the bedpost.
Lucinda Coxon’s film adaptation of Sarah Waters’ novel The Little Stranger plays with this idea with great effect, and the placing in time of the gothic horror is one that fits with the idea of neglect, of the social change that came about after the most heinous and destructive of periods in British history, World War Two.
The fear in the eyes of the so called ruling elite as they noticed that ordinary men and women now had a greater say in their daily lives, the facade of the British stiff upper lip that had graced the faces over centuries and perfected by the damnation of the Victorian era, was starting to crumble, the power to make you invisible a lessening effect; but one that still had the chance to get into the psyche, to bring ghosts and trials to the most stoutest of hearts.
At its heart, this Gothic horror is steeped in the finest traditions of the genre, the haunted house, the playing with Time as if it is a personification of evil, corrosion and decay, it is grand and sweeping, the slow unfolding of the narrative, the gentleness of the situation crossing swords with the outcome. There will be those that bemoan the lack of the more inclined animalistic, almost gut wrenching delight that the genre can bring but they will be the ones that don’t care for the intricate passing of entropy. Time is not always a vicious beast with teeth dripping in the waste of humanity’s experience and folly, quite often it is the spectre of dwindling fortune, of rot, a decomposing creature that leaks energy, one that has the ability to linger and grow strength as its body is eaten.
With excellent performances from Domhnall Gleeson as the reserved Doctor Faraday, Ruth Wilson as Caroline Ayers and Charlotte Rampling as the grief stricken but proud matriarch of Hundreds Hall, Mrs Ayres, The Little Stranger is arguably a film that delights in the tiniest of nuances, of the thrill from the unveiled reveal and the study in a period that defined true change after World War Two. A stunning depiction of a modern Gothic horror.
Ian D. Hall