The Little Stranger

I'd seen this film at the cinema and suggested that we screen it, and it definitely went down well. I think that anyone who saw it expecting a ghost story would have been disappointed, but in terms of atmosphere, pace and performance it was superb.

The Little Stranger

UK 2018          111 minutes

Director:          Lenny Abrahamson

Starring:            Domhnall Gleeson, Ruth Wilson, Will Poulter and Charlotte Rampling

“The haunts of childhood are revisited in this oppressively macabre ghost story, set in the miserable austerity of late-40s Britain and in some ways a metaphor for the nation’s complex sense of sacrificial loss. … The Little Stranger is fluently made and really well acted, particularly by Ruth Wilson, though maybe a bit too constrained by period-movie prestige to be properly scary.”

                                                                                                            Peter Bradshaw

In the summer of 1947 Dr Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson) is called to visit a patient at Hundreds Hall. He knows the place well as his mother once worked there as a maid but now the place is in decline and its three inhabitants - Mrs Ayres (Charlotte Rampling), her daughter Caroline (Ruth Wilson) and son Roderick (Will Poulter) - feel that the house is haunted by the ghost of Mrs Ayres’ first daughter who had died in childhood.

The film is based on the Booker-nominated novel by Sarah Waters. Despite the theme of her story Waters had not initially intended to write a ghost story: rather her intention had been to explore the rise of socialism how the fading remnants of the gentry dealt with losing their legacies. In this regard her decision to set the story in 1947 is crucial: the Labour landslide of 1945 allowed Attlee’s government to launch the NHS in July 1948. However both novel and film, which Mark Kermode accurately described as a “ghostly story” rather than a “ghost story”, carry echoes of classic ghost stories of the past including The Turn of the Screw by Henry James and The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson; other critics have also commented on their debt to novels (and films) as diverse as Rebecca, Brideshead Revisited and even The Great Gatsby.

All of Sarah Waters’ novels have historical settings and, with the exception of the most recent (The Paying Guests), have been adapted for either television or film. Fingersmith, a complex crime novel set in Victorian England, was memorably adapted by the BBC with a cast that included Sally Hawkins and Imelda Staunton; more recently award-winning South Korean director Park Chan-wook created a critically acclaimed and commercially successful film adaptation of the same book called The Handmaiden in which he transferred the action to colonial Korea in the 1930s.

Lenny Abrahamson is an Irish film director who began his career making commercials before directing independent films about people living on the fringes of Irish society. His film Frank (2014) (which also starred Domhnall Gleeson) a road movie set in Britain, Ireland and the USA received its premier at the Sundance Film Festival and he followed this with the film adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel Room (2015) which received Oscar nominations for Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and for Brie Larson as Best Leading Actress, although during the ceremony only Larson won an award.

Here is a link to the trailer: