His mother, Angela (Charlotte Rampling), has never really forgotten the death of her first daughter, Susan, many years prior. The home’s nominal master, Roderick (Will Poulter), is covered in burn scars from his service in the war and is reckoning with serious PTSD. So he goes upstairs to get a fuller diagnosis of what’s wrong at Hundreds Hall, and gets sucked into its deep churn of family drama, and possibly supernatural possession. He soon realizes the maid (Liv Hill) is not sick, but merely lonely, overwhelmed by her life in an empty house that was once fully staffed.

Into this decaying palace walks Doctor Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson), initially called to inspect the home’s maid (its only remaining servant), who has fallen ill. There’s a suggestion of the paranormal, though that dread could simply be the wheels of time turning against the upper-class Ayres family: They’re haunted equally by the loss of a daughter to illness years ago and by the loss of their place in the world as the country changes around them. Here, the emphasis isn’t on jump scares, but on genuine, pervasive dread. It’s a delicate movie that uses the standard dressing of a ghost story to dig into Britain’s postwar class upheaval.

It’s a crumbling edifice decades removed from its former glory, filled with the dysfunctional remnants of an aristocratic family.īut Lenny Abrahamson’s new film, an adaptation of Sarah Waters’s 2009 novel, isn’t quite as rote a tale as that setting might make it seem. Hundreds Hall, the main venue of The Little Stranger, has all the makings of a classic haunted house. Recent onscreen hauntings have included Guillermo del Toro’s excellent Crimson Peak in 2015, set in a manse where red mud dripped from the walls, or Ari Aster’s Hereditary, with its creepy dollhouses and even creepier mid-century modern home.

What better setting for a ghost story than a dilapidated mansion? Peeling paint, groaning pipes, creaky stairs, and abandoned rooms-you barely need a phantom to complete the picture.

The little stranger sarah waters review