Susan Granger’s review of “The Little Stranger” (Focus Features)
I’m absolutely stunned that a dumb, dull movie like this could garner raves from prestigious critics on National Public Radio, among others. What did they see that completely eluded me?
In 1948 in rural Warwickshire, England, staid Dr. Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson) is summoned to tend Betty (Liv Hill), a servant at Hundreds Hall. As he approaches, memories flood his mind, particularly a hot summer day in 1919, when he was eight years old and working-class villagers were invited to a fair on the estate grounds.
Since his mother once worked there as a housemaid, young Faraday (Oliver Zetterstrom) was allowed to venture inside, wandering the eerie, austere halls in awe, even filching a souvenir.
Hundreds Hall has been the ancestral home of the aristocratic Ayres family for more than two centuries, but now the once magnificent mansion has crumbled into decay. And its current inhabitants are haunted by some eerie, mysterious force.
There’s genteel Mrs. Angela Ayres (Charlotte Rampling) and her two adult children: disfigured Roderick (Will Poulson), who suffers from physical and psychological W.W.II wounds, and Caroline (Ruth Wilson), a serenely enigmatic spinster who catches shy, lonely Dr. Faraday’s eye.
“This house works on people,” notes brittle Mrs. Ayres.
Then terrible things start happening at Hundreds Hall. A visiting child is mauled by the family dog. Rod sets his library on fire. And Mrs. Ayres becomes convinced that the ghost of her eldest daughter, Suki, who died of diphtheria in childhood, is in an otherwise empty, upstairs bedroom.
“People like the Ayres will run you bloody ragged if you let them,” a colleague warns Faraday, who seems to be propelled by conscientiousness, making day-and-night house calls. Or is it, perhaps, repressed obsession?
Adapted by Lucinda Coxon from Sarah Walters’s 2009 neo-Gothic novel with a subtext of rigid British class politics and peculiarities, it’s directed by Lenny Abrahamson (“Room”), who relates the story with agonizingly methodical deliberateness, using Hundreds Hall as an off-kilter metaphor for disintegrating sanity.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Little Stranger” is a tedious 3, an understated, supernatural tease.
