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The Little Stranger (Lenny Abrahamson, 2018)
🕑 Added 2018-11-24 02:48:42 +0000 UTC
[NOTE: This post contains spoilers]
Certainly one of the year's most mismarketed films, The Little Stranger came across in its ads as Gothic art-horror along the lines of The Others or Crimson Peak. But then, the film is so strange in terms of what it actually attempts that I would not want the job of trying to sell it to a wide audience. A noble failure at best, The Little Stranger was doomed from the start -- or better yet, benighted, much like its characters.
If we take it at face value, it is a movie with terrible pacing and mediocre direction. Sad to say, Abrahamson hasn't much improved since Room, and his manner of generating atmosphere and import is to just simmer everything slow and low, letting downcast whispers and torpid plotting stand in for mood. Combine this with the fact that, by all rights, a viewer is expecting a haunted house narrative and is spending an hour-plus on fairly rote Brontëisms, and one might reasonably wonder what they'd signed up for.
But that's when, against the odds, things get interesting. Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson), our country-doctor narrator and point of identification, becomes more than just our point of entry into the decaying upper-class world of Hundreds Hall and the once-mighty Ayers family. Instead, he becomes the focal point of a story about bone-deep class resentment and its unlikely intersection with the supernatural. The doctor's mother was a cleaning woman at Hundreds Hall, and he prowled the manor as a child, acutely aware that he was a nobody in this world. But now, as an adult, he can offer succor to the war-wrecked son of the manor (Will Poulter), and perhaps become a surrogate man of the house.
He wants to marry the intelligent, resourceful Caroline (Ruth Wilson), who sees him as just a friend. She wants to escape the crumbling manor and live a new life in Canada or America, but Faraday wants to attach her to Hundreds Hall, like a ghost who can never leave under threat of death. In the end, we learn that his psyche has formed a "poltergeist," his repressed childhood jealousy having become an entity apart from his conscious control.
The working class is engaging in telekinetic revolt? As you can see, there's no way to make these ideas come together in a fully satisfying way. Faraday's anger becomes a physical force, one that eventually manifests as a "ghost" of his younger self and pushes Caroline over the bannister to her death. Being the last man standing, he "inherits" Hundreds Hall, a ramshackle ruin to which he is bound like a living ghost. Rather than true Marxist praxis, his actions are more along the lines of Nietzschean ressentiment. There is no "Communist Gothic." It was a nice try.
