The Little Stranger review: a glowering gothic mystery that gets stranger by the minute

Dir: Lenny Abrahamson; Starring: Domhnall Gleeson, Ruth Wilson, Charlotte Rampling, Will Poulter, Liv Hill. 12A cert, 111 mins.

Lenny Abrahamson’s new film lives up to its title in one key respect: every scene is a little stranger than the last. Based on a 2009 book by Sarah Waters – whose earlier novel Fingersmith was recently dazzlingly transposed to occupied Korea in Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden – The Little Stranger introduces itself as a 1940s-set class-conscious romance before transforming into a glowering gothic mystery, without ever quite tipping into the full-blown horror its more unnerving passages and sporadically crash-bang sound design seem to be cueing up. 

Nonetheless, it centres on a house that is in a very real sense haunted – though exactly what it is haunted by is the secret its clockwork plot very slowly and methodically unveils. Domhnall Gleeson stars as Faraday, a country doctor whose practice in rural Warwickshire brings him into contact with the residents of Hundreds Hall, a country estate that has fallen into semi-ruin, and whose tumble from its pre-war glory days does not yet appear to be complete.

It belongs to the remnants of the Ayres family: contentedly dowdy Caroline (Ruth Wilson), her reclusive brother Roderick (Will Poulter), a former RAF pilot left scarred and crippled by the Second World War, and the inscrutable head of the household Mrs Ayres (Charlotte Rampling), for whom Faraday’s own mother worked as a servant during his childhood. 

As a boy Faraday had been spellbound by the place: so much so that he once snapped off a plaster acorn from a decorative wall panel, to satisfy his need to possess just a small part of its grandeur and elegance. Now fully grown, and comporting himself with the stiff-backed pragmatism of an HB pencil, he has returned – to finish the job, in a sense, by inveigling himself back into the family’s lives.

Yet Hundreds Hall is no longer the idyllic Brideshead of Faraday’s fond rememberings. In the intervening years, a kind of evil seems to have taken root in its timbers, like dry rot – causing strange knocks and creaks, unexplained stomach pains in the last remaining servant (Liv Hill), and worse.

Abrahamson has form when it comes to homes as sealed-off worlds. The Irish director’s previous film was the 2016 best picture Oscar nominee Room, which had Brie Larson as a kidnapped young woman raising her five-year-old son, played by Jacob Tremblay, in the cell-like confines of her captor’s shed. The Little Stranger is far more elusive and insinuating, where the malign forces at work are rooted in class resentment and postwar social upheaval, and have to be unpicked by the viewer from Faraday’s own, very specific narratorial perspective. This is all faithfully reproduced from Waters’ novel, but on screen it can leave the story feeling aimless and distant – all atmospherics, no pay-off.

Still, like Room, the film is anchored by two terrific performances: Gleeson’s sullen, repressed and self-loathing Faraday, whose clipped RP voice covers up almost but not quite every last trace of his regional accent, and Wilson’s Caroline, the last remaining source of Hundreds Hall’s life force, sturdy and bluff at first, but slowly, uneasily coming to terms with her own endangered status. Both characters are so hard to warm to, the set-up could be pitched as anti-lead meets anti-love-interest – but together they have a tense, compelling chemistry that carries the film through its gloomier longueurs.

Abrahamson’s film is operating in a couple of appealing, not-too-common modes: the very English antiquarian ghost story, as pioneered by MR James, in which the past itself can manifest as a restless, vengeful spirit, and the related but distinct French tradition of the fantastique, in which the everyday world is knocked out of joint by an intruding, inexplicable force.

For me, the best recent film to venture into such territory is Olivier Assayas’s outstanding, Kristen Stewart-starring supernatural thriller Personal Shopper, in which the objective truth (or otherwise) of the haunting matters less than the hauntees’ inner lives and buried secrets. The Little Stranger doesn’t stir up the same exquisite, unpindownable dread as Assayas’s film, but its shivers are sophisticated, and not easily shrugged off.