The Woman In Black, review Dir: James Watkins; starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Ciarán Hinds, Janet McTeer Susan Hill's sepulchral, haar-shrouded tale of strange goings-on at Eel Marsh House has been adapted for the screen once before, and very capably too. The Central Television production of The Woman In Black, broadcast on Christmas Eve 1989 and repeated only once in 1994, is often held up as one of the most potent, paralysingly spooky screen adaptations of a ghost story ever made. So why make it again? Well, because Daniel Radcliffe will bring in a sizeable audience for one thing, and because the distribution rights to the Central Television version are missing in action, for another. But thanks to its vividly-styled, almost hyper-Edwardian setting and some canny plot alterations by screenwriter Jane Goldman, this feels less like a remake than a new reading of an old story, trembling with freshly terrifying resonances. Radcliffe gives a clear-eyed, plausibly grown-up performance as Arthur Kipps, a lawyer summoned to a remote mansion to settle its recently-deceased owner's estate. In one of the major departures from Hill's novel, Kipps is a young widower, which perhaps makes him more susceptible to whispers about the house's tragic past. A local landowner (Ciarán Hinds) lets slip a few details about a mysterious, cloaked woman who's occasionally glimpsed at the window, although Kipps learns a great deal more about her first-hand when, in order to finish his paperwork on time, he decides to spend the night at Eel Marsh House himself. Director James Watkins expertly uses shadows and empty spaces to create a percolating sense of dread, and he waits until the last possible moment before allowing his audience the catharsis of a shock. Don't be reassured by the 12A certificate: there's barely a glimpse of anything scary in this film, but that's precisely what makes it so terrifying. Neither the 1989 televised adaptation nor the enduringly popular stage play are entirely faithful to Hill's novel, and this latest version takes the plot down some cobweb-strewn corridors of its own, but its marriage of gothic fiction and gothic fashion feels entirely right for our times. Like all of the best ghost stories, The Woman In Black is only enriched in the retelling.