Crew
Director – Justin Molotnikov, Screenplay – Barbara Machin, Based on the Novel The Small Hand: A Ghost Story (2010) by Susan Hill, Producer – Jane Steventon, Photography – Alan McLaughlin, Music – Lorne Balfe, Visual Effects Supervisor – Chris Duffy, Special Effects – Artem Scotland & SFX GB, Production Design – Emer O’Sullivan. Production Company – Awesome Media & Entertainment/Two Rivers Media.
Cast
Douglas Henshall (Adam Snow), Louise Lombard (Alice Merriman), Adrian Rawlins (Edward Merriman), Cal MacAninch (Hugo Snow), Paul Barber (Brother Thierry), Maryam Hamidi (Benedicta Snow), Woody Norman (Jamie), Neve McIntosh (Denisa Parsons)
Plot
Rare book dealer Adam Snow travels to visit his friends Edward and Alice Merriman in the Scottish countryside. On the way there, he is drawn towards an abandoned mansion. At the gate of the property, he feels an invisible child’s hand tugging at his. While visiting the Merrimans, Adam professes his love for Alice, his ex, and tries to persuade her to leave Edward for him. The two renew their relationship in secrecy. Adam expresses curiosity about the mansion and Edward arranges for him to buy it cheaply. As he moves in, Adam begins to see spooky things happening around the house, especially the malicious ghost of a young boy. Adam also senses that this links back to forgotten aspects of his childhood.
This is a film adapted from the novel The Small Hand: A Ghost Story (2010) by Susan Hill. Hill is the author of assorted ghost stories and crime fiction. Her most well-known book is The Woman in Black (1983). This has been twice adapted to the screen as the tv movie The Woman in Black (1989) and then the high-profile The Woman in Black (2012) from the revived Hammer Films, which earned $128 million worldwide and produced a sequel The Woman in Black: Angel of Death (2014). Hill’s name is prominently featured on the opening credits of the film – she is listed as an executive producer and when the film’s title comes up it is Susan Hill’s The Small Hand: A Ghost Story.
The film is adapted by Barbara Machin, a UK tv writer best known as creator of the cold case detective series Waking the Dead (2000-11). If internet rumour is to be believed, Susan Hill (aged 71) left her husband and moved in in a relationship with Manchin, who was engaged in adapting several of Hill’s works (although the only one of these to emerge to the screen was The Small Hand). The film is directed by Justin Molotnikov, a regular on British tv shows such as Doctor Who (2005- ), Atlantis (2013-5), DaVinci’s Demons (2013-5), Outlander (2014- ) and Poldark (2015-9), with this being his second film. The Small Hand premiered on UK’s Channel 5.
The Small Hand is clearly seeking to catch some of the tail wind of The Woman in Black. The film has been mounted as a prestige production. It is lushly photographed (location shooting in Scotland) and the house looks impeccably laid out in its decay and abandonment. The film has been admirably well cast with Douglas Henshall, who has quite a name on British tv, and assorted other faces. Especially when you compare it to most of the other Haunted House films that I get to review here, which are mostly made on B budgets, this shouts out being a class production.
Justin Molotnikov provides an artful series of jumps with doors abruptly slamming, things falling, a ghostly radio-controlled toy car that keeps turning up and assorted figures of the young boy appearing in the background or flitting through the foreground. It ably delivers what we expect of this sort of ghost story. Molotnikov never quite delves into the ambiguity that haunts some of these films – there are vague suggestions that Douglas Henshall is affected by his brother’s mental health issues – but what we see is too overt for us to place any stock in doubting any of this.
The Small Hand is a solid run through of the ghost story. As a genre, the ghost story/haunted house is one where it feels that all the genre’s tropes and permutations have fairly much played out. The Small Hand reuses several of them – the people moving into the big old house with a troubled history; the ghosts of the past reaching out for closure – and does a decent job with the material. It is not a groundbreaking work, just a familiar work well told.
Trailer here