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The Little Stranger
****
Dir: Lenny Abrahamson (12A 111 mins)
Starring: Domhnall Gleeson, Ruth Wilson, Will Poulter
(UK, 12A, 1hr 51mins)
Sarah Waters’ superb novel is translated to the screen in gripping style by Room director Lenny Abrahamson, although inevitably it loses some of the many layers of its source material. The strangely ubiquitous Domhnall Gleeson takes centre stage as Dr Faraday, the unreliable narrator of the book, a social climber with connections to an aristocratic family whose fortunes are on the wane in post-WWII Britain.
Faraday is called to the Ayres family home, Hundreds Hall, where his mother had once been a servant and where he had spent his early years. Now the Ayres family are in disarray, with matriarch Charlotte Rampling presiding over her son and daughter Roderick and Caroline.
Roderick (played by Will Poulter, last seen as a bigot in the excellent Detroit), we find out, has been disfigured fighting in the war and suffers from PTSD. He thinks there is something haunting the house. Caroline (played by the ever-excellent Ruth Wilson) is someone Faraday has lingering, disquieting feelings for that lead inexorably to tragedy. Is the house haunted however and if so, by what?
Taking mental illness, class, toxic masculinity and the role of women in post-war Britain into account within its structure, this is rich material, which the cast play to the hilt. Lucinda Coxon’s adaptation does a good job of making a gracenotes version of the novel whilst Abrahamson manages to balance social drama with a claustrophobic atmosphere that drips with dread and foreboding, right down to its final moments.
The cast are good. Gleeson is at times perhaps a little too stiff, but Wilson and Poulter excel.
The film captures a unique moment of transition in Britain, just as Waters’ novel did, with the old guard and the aristocrats are about to be replaced by something else, something full of anger. A plague is on the Ayres’ house, the plague of change, the ghosts of the past and the fear of the future. Involving, tense and atmospheric, The Little Stranger should prove award-worthy.
words Keiron Self
Opens September 21