The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death

Eel Marsh House, the brooding and dreary manor house that serves as the setting for The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, is one of the most well designed haunted houses that I have seen on film.  It is a marvel of set design and atmosphere.  Too bad the movie can't think of much to do within the confines of the house.  Unlike the 2012 original film, which was a slow burn paranormal thriller that built to some genuine tension, this sequel pretty much goes nowhere in particular.

The story kicks off in 1941, when London is being blitzed by Axis forces in the early days of World War II.  Some of the local children have been arranged to head into the countryside so that they will be safe until the bombings stop.  The children are looked after by the kind and lovely Eve (Phoebe Fox), and the cranky old headmistress (Helen McCrory) who looks like she stepped right out of a Dickens novel.  The two women board a train with the children, and take them to Eel Marsh House where they'll supposedly be safe.  Of course, anyone who saw the first film already knows that the house is the source of a curse in the surrounding town that took the lives of dozens of children at the hands of a lady-like specter, the titular Woman in Black.  Nobody talks about the curse or the legend of the deadly Woman anymore, so maybe it's fallen out over the years.

After the children have been settled into their new home, Eve begins investigating the house, finding strange old artifacts left behind that hint at its dark past.  One of the children, a mute boy named Edward (Oaklee Pendergast), also begins acting strangely and clutching onto an antique doll that he claims to have found somewhere within the house.  As the influence of the Woman in Black begins to spread once again throughout Eel Marsh House, the children start going missing or dying in bizarre accidents.  Eve must now race to find out the truth behind the entity that haunts the halls, but there is a problem for the audience with this approach.  We already know the history of the house and the ghost that haunts it.  So, we get to wait for the main character to catch up with the knowledge we have in advance.

Perhaps this couldn't be helped, and I probably wouldn't mind so much if the movie could provide some successful scares or suspense.  However, director Tom Harper constantly falls on tired old jump scares, such as a crow suddenly beating its wings up against a window.  As a supernatural villain, the Woman in Black is the sort who likes to wait in the dark, scream at the camera, then disappear.  She occasionally makes a rocking chair move by itself, or brings some dusty old antique toys to life, but she seems pretty limited in what she can do when she's not taking over the minds of innocent children.  One would certainly hope that the afterlife would consist of more than just standing around and screaming at the living, going from one jump scare to the next.  All I could think while watching the movie is that the Woman in Black needs a hobby.

Angel of Death is well made for a fairly low budget production.  It has an appropriately gloomy atmosphere, with fog that seems to roll onto the landscape by the buckets.  And again, the design of Eel Marsh House is fantastic, and immediately gets the audience ready for a spooky time.  Even the performances are pretty good.  All of these qualities simply cannot rise above the workmanlike scares and lack of tension, though.  It constantly feels like more should be happening within the film, but more often than not, it's just repeated scenes of the characters crawling through the dark.  The last film had a lot of that, too, but it was handled better and felt like it was building to something.  Things never build in the sequel, so all we can do is admire the set design, and wish it was being put to better use.

The Woman in Black 2 has the distinction of being both an early January release and an unneeded sequel to a pretty good movie.  Given those two things against it, the movie is at least watchable.  It just never rises to anything we can really care much about.  This is the kind of movie that almost seems like it was made to be forgotten after its opening weekend has passed.

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