The Little Stranger review – Ruth Wilson shines in mournful ghost story

Death and decline haunt postwar Britain as Sarah Waters’ novel is brought to deliciously sinister life by Lenny Abrahamson

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. Screenwriter Lucinda Coxon has adapted the 2009 novel by Sarah Waters and Lenny Abrahamson directs, bringing to it the sense of enclosing dread and claustrophobic dysfunction familiar from his previous picture, the abduction-abuse nightmare Room. 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.

Domhnall Gleeson plays Faraday, a young Warwickshire country doctor: first name unmentioned, second name perhaps an allusion to the famous scientist, given his belief in electric-current massage for pain-relief and his non-belief in ghosts. He has a ramrod-straight bearing, a clipped moustache and equally clipped manner of speaking, very different from the relaxed, worldly manner of his fellow medics. Gleeson’s performance suggests he’s affecting a severe professionalism to cover up his lowly origins.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PPAzQP