Little Stranger, The (2018) [Blu-ray]
Drama | Horror | Mystery | Thriller

Tagline: These Delusions Are Contagious

In the summer of 1948, Dr. Faraday travels to attend to a patient at Hundreds Hall, home to the Ayers family for more than two centuries. The Hall is now in decline and its inhabitants are haunted by something more ominous than a dying way of life. When he takes on his new patient, Faraday has no idea how closely, and how disturbingly, the family's story is about to become entwined with his own. Based on the book by bestselling author Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger stars Domhnall Gleeson (Ex Machina, Brooklyn) and is directed by Oscar-nominated director Lenny Abrahamson (Room).

Storyline: The Little Stranger tells the story of Dr. Faraday, the son of a housemaid, who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country doctor. During the long hot summer of 1948, he is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall, where his mother once worked. The Hall has been home to the Ayres family for more than two centuries. But it is now in decline and its inhabitants - mother, son and daughter - are haunted by something more ominous than a dying way of life. When he takes on his new patient, Faraday has no idea how closely, and how disturbingly, the family's story is about to become entwined with his own.

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Peter Travers on August, 2018 -- The way Focus Features kept cancelling scheduled screenings of The Little Stranger made me think it had a stiff on its hands. Hardly. Though this meditation on the past - disguised as a haunted-house thriller - has its faults, the film is better than most of the junk cluttering the multiplex these days (looking at you, The Happytime Murders). Director Lenny Abrahamson earned much-deserved raves for 2015's Room, which won a Best Actress Oscar for Brie Larson. So why sweep his latest, starring the talented likes of Ruth Wilson, Domhnall Gleason and Charlotte Rampling, under a rug?

Based on the 2009 a novel by Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger is perhaps hurt by a neo-Gothic atmosphere of dread that may lead audiences to expect cheap horror-show scares. But Abrahamson is far more interested in the bruised humanity of his characters. Gleeson brings hidden layers to the tightly-wound, perpetually glum Faraday, a Warwickshire country doctor of humble origins who finds himself called, in the summer of 1948, to make a professional visit to Hundreds Hall, a mansion where his mother once worked as a maid. Home to the Ayres family for centuries, the Hall has seen better days - you can almost smell it decaying. But the family matriarch, Angela (Rampling, reliably superb) still rules as if by divine right. Angela's son Roderick (Will Poulter) has returned from the war covered in burn scars that underscore his even more serious PTSD. His sister Caroline (Wilson) appears normal enough for even the austere Faraday to develop an instant crush - but at Hundreds Hall, looks can be deceiving. Has Angela really ever gotten over her first daughter, Susan, who died years before at the tender age of eight? Is it the ghost of Susan making the floors groan, filling the halls with a banging noise and ringing a servant's bell from an empty room?

It only sounds like a setup for a mid-century Paranormal Activity. Abrahamson cleverly uses the house as a metaphor for crumbling sanity. Witness the effect on Faraday, who is drawn back to his childhood when he (the titular little stranger) visited the Hall in its heyday, and felt "its cool, fragrant spaces" fill his dreams. In flashback, Abrahamson recreates the day of that glorious visit, with young Faraday (Oliver Zetterstrom) imagining himself part of a world out of reach.

The class system and its ruthless pecking order is something Abrahamson sews into the fabric of his film. Faraday's courtship of Caroline is just another way to belong. Kudos to Wilson (how has she not won an Emmy for her brilliant work on The Affair?), who builds what seems at first like a peripheral character into the defiant soul of the movie. In the final scenes, Abrahamson reverts to the twists and tropes of the typical ghost story. But before that, he uses shivery suspense and a keen sense of character to craft The Little Stranger into a hypnotic and haunting tale of how the past can grab hold of the flesh-and-blood present and squeeze. Don't let this mesmerizing mystery slip between the cracks of studio neglect and marketing indifference. It's spellbinding.

[CSW] -2.3- The acting is top notch and there's a constant air of mystery and intrigue as to how this story will unfold and why but it is going to leave a lot of viewers frustrated due to its extremely slow pacing and ambiguities. And believe me when I say extremely slow-paced with ambiguities. The house is one of the main characters and it too is on a slow spiral downward. This is more a drama than a ghost story. There are holes in the back story. For those that can stay with a tale like this, it does keep you guessing but I would have liked a better ending for sure.
[V4.5-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box
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Do not read any further if you plan to watch the film and want to come to your own conclusions. Fariday's character is a Jekyll and Hyde character but unlike Jekyll who knows he is also the monster Hyde, he is so desperately longing for love and acceptance that he doesn't know how to get that he is unaware of his Mr. Hyde. It's some kind of version of his childish rage and longing. The final shot of the movie offers as explicit an explanation as it's going to give you: the spectral image of Faraday as a child peering down to where Caroline fell. When he was a poor, local child, Faraday visited this once-great home, and ever since then, he has been entranced by it. The child, who always somehow desperately wanted the life he was excluded from, in the big house. He's a clever, sensitive little boy who's ambitious, whose mother adored this place so she probably filled him with stories about how amazing the family and the house were. And so his whole life had warped his desire to be accepted by people who won't accept him. The boy does get the house, but what he gets is bricks and mortar and emptiness. None of the glamour, none of the warmth, none of the love and excitement that he imagined as a child. His hidden malevolence presents itself to Roddy, who obviously was in a fireball of a plane crash, as fire. To Mrs. Ayres, it shows itself as the lost girl, the daughter, Sukey, who is also the misdirect. But to Caroline, it's the monstrous version of him, which is the closest to the truth. And at the end, we just see the boy.

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