The Woman in Black can be described (charitably) as The Changeling meets The Shining meets Ringu, but it somehow manages to avoid every single last attribute that made each of those films great. All the disaggregated components of those films are here jumbled together in rank confusion: you’ve got creepy little girls, a highly isolated old house, a catatonic widower with nerves impervious to any form of shock, an unfulfilled ghost with an agenda, a weirdo scratching messages, a house with locked doors that open, a possessed rocking chair, creepy pictures being super-normally altered, a dead child being dug up. Basically the filmmakers just ripped off every cool idea from these three classic films, and then bungled them all disastrously.

I’ve never seen a horror film rely so heavily on startling the living crap out of the audience with cheap, shocking “surprises.” All bad horror films do it to a certain extent, to fill time, but The Woman in Black takes it to a new level. You have to hand it to them in a way: these filmmakers squeezed every last drop of startle-potential out of that house. Endless sequences where the lead character turns around blind to the camera, endless sequences where he is staring off to the side and something moves in the background, endless sequences where he is staring right at the camera and something moves behind him, endless sequences where some (really loud) bird flies out of nowhere, endless sequences where he’s looking through something and someone passes in front of his field of vision, endless sequences where he opens a door and someone is standing there, endless sequences where he looks up, his eyes get big, and then they cut to something horrifying (or not so horrifying.) It’s an exhausting film in this way, it gets old really, really fast, and it goes on way too long.

And what is with that house?! Why does every room have a super-creepy monkey statue with eyes that seem to be alive? Why does the child’s room have all those freaky, terrifying wind-up toys: all manner of animals, seemingly infected by St. Anthony’s Fire. Why is the place so fucking dusty, like it hasn’t been lived in for centuries?! And while we’re chronicling absurdities, what papers was he supposed to be reviewing for his law firm? The crumpled, lunatic scribblings of an insane woman, crammed in shoe boxes under beds? This is what his firm sent him out there to “review?”

Then we come to Daniel Radcliffe, a.k.a. Harry Potter. I wonder if he is trying to distance himself from Harry Potter with this movie. After all, he’s playing a father, conferring on him “instant adulthood,” and he’s clearly reaching for a James McAvoy kind of air. But this film seemed very Harry Potter-like to me: same grey cinematography, same endless dreary landscapes and buildings, same British character actors slumming for cash, and since Radcliffe has no lines in this movie, he spends a lot of time looking like … an upset Harry Potter! I think he should have done a romantic comedy!

My advice is go watch an old horror film, from back in the day when they knew how to make them! Skip this ridiculous and tiresome piece of trash!