Daniel Radcliffe begins to move away from Harry Potter with some credibility here, even if it still leaps out at you when a boy runs up to him and calls him 'Daddy'. He plays a young lawyer in Edwardian London who has lost his wife and is in danger of losing his job, sent to a small country village to go through the paperwork in a vacant local manor. This turns out to be a sombre place of mist and shadows, and the locals do their utmost to dissuade him from going there, in the best tradition of the gothic horror story. He of course persists, and not before long is hearing and seeing things while the village children keep dying off.
No slasher film this, it's a welcome modern take on the Poesque chiller which for most of its duration leaves more to the imagination and has you constantly scanning the out-of-focus background which is carefully composed in shot after shot to suggest that something may just be there. The wide-eyed Radcliffe is also good casting for the genre, backed up by the dependable Ciarán Hinds as his one ally in the village. It's a pity, then, that it fails to follow its own plot logic at the end, but at least the ride there has been a satisfying one.
6/10
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