The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death takes place in 1941, decades after the events of the first film. London is suffering from constant German bombing. Teacher Eve Parkins (Phoebe Fox) is accompanying children evacuees from London to a remote abandoned house in the English countryside. They’re meant to be safe in this isolated location, but that quickly proves to not be the case. Eve comes to suspect that they aren’t alone in the house. And whatever is in there with them presents a real danger to the children in the house.
If you haven’t seen the first movie, you needn’t worry about keeping out. The film is pretty much self-contained, the history inessential to the final effect of the movie. Unfortunately, this is because the film isn’t really trying to do anything interesting. This isn’t so much a sequel as it is just another chance to use the same setting and rehash many of the scenes from the original. There’s precious little inspiration to be found within the hundred minutes of this film’s runtime.
The very first thing that must be said is that this movie isn’t very scary. This might be because it’s too dark to actually see anything. Horror movies are meant to be dark, but Angel of Death seems determined to be the darkest of all. The film is a recipe for eyestrain, its visuals muddy and dim almost all throughout. And so it hardly gets around to showing us anything scary. Or maybe they’re there, but we just can’t see it. There are clearly scenes where we’re meant to be creeped out by something in the shadows. But it’s hard to feel anything when you aren’t even sure if there’s anything there.
But even if we could see what was going on, it just doesn’t seem very interesting. This is just another ghost story where the ghost’s motives are kept muddy and unclear until the very end. It seems to have incredible power, but it just doesn’t use it. This ghost seems to want to cause children to harm themselves, and it certainly has the ability to do so. But it only does this sporadically, the ghost preferring to hold off on its goals in order to stand threateningly in the background of scenes, or to benignly touch the shoulder of the main character.
It all gets much sillier in the back end, where underdeveloped backstories are presented as parts of the eventual resolution. Short on ideas and actual peril, the movie basically conjures up a series of pointless jump scares. In the end, the movie forgoes logic as it simply goes through the motions of the standard horror movie ending. The acting is pretty standard as well. Phoebe Fox and Jeremy Irvine are passable at best, the actors failing to leave much of an impression.
The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death is just basic horror nonsense. It doesn’t really take advantage of its very specific setting. It doesn’t produce any original or memorable scares. It doesn’t even really explain its subtitle. The film seem to avoid the specific, preferring the warm and boring embrace of standard modern horror, where the characters are never really scared, but merely startled. This is the extent of the danger that modern horror characters face. One only needs to worry for the ones with heart conditions.
My Rating:
