The Woman in Black (Rated PG-13)  Four Stars

The Woman in Black (95 minutes) wasn’t the best movie I’ve seen in the last year, but at least it was entertaining. As a film, it fit nicely into the grand Gothic tradition of classic English horror movies. Writer Jane Goldman did a nice job of updating the 1983 Susan Hill novel … not surprising from someone with writing credits on Stardust, Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class. Too bad her big finale came off as unnecessarily sentimental. In fact, the notoriously hard-to-find 1989 UK telefilm really sounds like it had the more satisfying ending.

In Edwardian England a lawyer named Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) prepares to leave his son Joseph (Misha Handley) with a nanny (Jessica Raine). Kipps is trying to get over a run of bad luck, and step one is catering to his employer by heading out to the middle of nowhere to handle the estate of the Drablow family. On the train to the village nearest Eel Marsh House, Kipps meets Sam Daily (Ciarán Hinds).

Arriving on a dark and stormy night, he finds out there’s no room at the inn, and is promptly put into the Attic-Room-of-People-Jumping-Out-of-Windows by the helpful proprietor. Once he gets to mingle with the villagers, everyone acts real shady, like they’re going to murder him and hide the body if he’s not on the next train out of town. The next day, despite ample evidence that he should get the heck out of Dodge, Kipps heads out to the spooky isolated mansion that is closed off to the outside world during high tides.

Though my first move would have been to light every candle in the house and start a roaring fire, he gets right to work sorting through a Hoarders-style stockpile of paperwork. I’m not really sure why a lawyer was needed for this, since there are apparently no surviving relatives, but at least we get a ton of thrilling scenes that revolve around paper. During a break from the excitement, he sees the titular Woman in Black (Liz White), and later reports the sighting to the village constable. After he finishes up telling the nice policemen things they don’t want to hear, he heads over to Sam’s for dinner. The dinner is rather awkward, what with Sam’s crazy wife Elizabeth (Janet McTeer) bringing her yap-yap dogs out to the table and making polite dinner conversation about dead children and communing with the afterlife.

Over the next day or so, the story of the Drablows is re-vealed in bits and pieces, though it seems like the backstory could have answered a few more questions than it does. For the one millionth time, the villagers try to get Kipps to leave. Despite lots of paranormal stuff going down every time he walks through the door, a ghosts-aren’t-real pep talk from Sam gets him back to work. This time, he takes a dog for company and decides it is a great idea to spend the night in the clearly haunted house in which he has already seen, heard and felt several ghosts.

He manages to get through the night without actually having a heart attack from fear, although judging from the reaction in the theater, the filmmakers did a great job of ratcheting up the tension for the average viewer. For some reason, Sam finally gets on board the I Do Believe in Spooks train, and helps Kipps carry out a brilliant idea. He has decided that the way to put the spirit to rest is to reunite her with her child, which apparently involves heading out to the marsh on a dark and stormy night to grope around in a mud pit the color and con-sistency of melted Hershey’s Chocolate.

For Radcliffe’s first post-Potter production that doesn’t involve being naked on a horse, he did all right. The pacing was pretty tight, and there was at least the effort to temper the too schmaltzy ending with an ominous final scene.

Now showing at Wynnsong 7, Carmike 12 and Carmike Market Fair 15.