The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death Phoebe Fox, Jeremy Irvine, Helen McCrory. Directed by Tom Harper. Rated PG-13. Now playing.
No good (or bad, for that matter) surprise hit goes unpunished, which is why the atmospheric, understated and self-contained 2012 horror movie The Woman in Black now has a superfluous sequel. The low-key and spooky original boasted an impressive cast (led by Daniel Radcliffe in his first big post-Harry Potter role) and a simple but effective story, based on the 1983 novel by Susan Hill. The sequel features a B-level cast, a recycled story and a relative lack of scares, although it makes occasionally strong use of its period setting and isolated location.
Like the original, The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death takes place at the remote Eel Marsh House, a creepy, abandoned mansion haunted by the title character. In 1941, decades after the events of the first movie, schoolteacher Eve Parkins (Phoebe Fox) leads a group of young students who take refuge in the house after fleeing the London Blitz. Of course, holing up in a haunted house is not much of an improvement over being bombarded by Nazi explosives, and soon the children start meeting gruesome ends, while Eve and a handsome local military pilot (Jeremy Irvine) investigate the house’s troubled history.
That history was thoroughly documented in the first movie, so it gets a fairly perfunctory recap here, and at least Angel of Death doesn’t commit the cardinal sin of most horror sequels by trying to pile on excessive back story. The Woman in Black’s background and motivation are the same, and she’s still focused on luring young children to their deaths. While Radcliffe and director James Watkins brought a certain emotional resonance to the main character in the first movie, Eve is less compelling, although Fox gives a solid performance.
Like Watkins, Angel of Death director Tom Harper relies heavily on the creepy atmosphere of the house and the surrounding town, but he relies even more heavily on sudden loud noises, which are the source of the majority of the movie’s meager scares. The constant terror of war is a fruitful backdrop for a horror movie, but Angel of Death only periodically connects its horrors to the greater horror going on in the world. The first Woman in Black was a familiar horror story effectively told; the sequel is just as familiar, but the presentation is lacking.
