The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death (2014)

 

Director: Tom Harper

Cast: Phoebe Fox, Jeremy Irvine, Helen McCrory, Adrian Rawlins, Leanne Best, Ned Dennehy

Screenplay: Jon Croker

98 mins. Rated PG-13 for some disturbing and frightening imagery and for thematic elements.

 

Ah, the January movie dump bin…how tragic.

Decades after the events of the first film, Eve Parkins (Phoebe Fox, One Day, War Book) and Jean Hogg (Helen McCrory, TV’s Penny Dreadful, Skyfall) have taken their schoolchildren to the Eel Marsh House in Crythin Gifford as a place of refuge. Eve doesn’t fully understand, though, that a dark force still resides in the house and wants the children for herself. Now, Eve and her new friend Harry (Jeremy Irvine, War Horse, Beyond the Reach) must discover the horrifying truth about the Woman in Black (Leanne Best, TV’s Ripper Street, Salting the Battlefield).

Helen McCrory is kind of a bish in this movie. Yeah, I said it. Bish.

There are two classic types of characters in horror films. The first is the character that you want to live. The second is the character that you want to die. Then, there are the characters of The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, the type of character that you just want to be interested in, but you still don’t. Not a single character is performed in such a way that I cared about any of them.

Don’t even get me started on the look of this film. It certainly has less elegance to it than The Woman in Black, very poorly shot and very blurry during some of the sequences that should’ve been more exciting. The film was also very poorly lit. I couldn’t see a damn thing.

The question we need to be asking ourselves when seeing a sequel is: how are we progressing the story or taking the series in a new direction? With this bland sequel, we don’t have an answer. This film is unneeded and essentially rehashes the progression of the first film. We don’t move forward. We, in fact, move backward. I’m not even sure how that is possible, but it happened.

The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death goes nowhere when it makes a smart move that explore new territory by moving the story forward years. It could have built on the story presented of the first film, and then it didn’t.

 

1/5

-Kyle A. Goethe