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The Little Stranger

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The Little Stranger 's reliance on atmosphere may satisfy audiences in the mood for sophisticated horror fare -- while frustrating those seeking more visceral thrills.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Lenny Abrahamson

Domhnall Gleeson

Dr. Faraday

Ruth Wilson

Caroline Ayres

Charlotte Rampling

Will Poulter

Roddy Ayres

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The Little Stranger review – Ruth Wilson shines in mournful ghost story

Death and decline haunt postwar Britain as Sarah Waters’ novel is brought to deliciously sinister life by Lenny Abrahamson

T he haunts of childhood are revisited in this oppressively macabre ghost story, set in the miserable austerity of late-40s Britain and in some ways a metaphor for the nation’s complex sense of sacrificial loss. Screenwriter Lucinda Coxon has adapted the 2009 novel by Sarah Waters and Lenny Abrahamson directs, bringing to it the sense of enclosing dread and claustrophobic dysfunction familiar from his previous picture, the abduction-abuse nightmare Room . The Little Stranger is fluently made and really well acted, particularly by Ruth Wilson, though maybe a bit too constrained by period-movie prestige to be properly scary.

Domhnall Gleeson plays Faraday, a young Warwickshire country doctor: first name unmentioned, second name perhaps an allusion to the famous scientist, given his belief in electric-current massage for pain-relief and his non-belief in ghosts. He has a ramrod-straight bearing, a clipped moustache and equally clipped manner of speaking, very different from the relaxed, worldly manner of his fellow medics. Gleeson’s performance suggests he’s affecting a severe professionalism to cover up his lowly origins.

It’s the summer of 1948 and Faraday finds himself back in the village where he grew up, and one of his very first house-calls is to the grand mansion that fascinated him as a boy, Hundreds Hall. A maidservant there, Betty (Liv Hill) has stomach pains, but Faraday’s no-nonsense examination reveals them to be exaggerated or invented. A female-hysteric case of nerves, as often airily diagnosed by the male profession of the day – or something darker, weirder?

At the same time, Faraday makes the acquaintance of the family. The notional master of the house is Rod Ayres (Will Poulter), a former RAF pilot badly burned in combat, who now has depression, and is grumpily obsessed with the way the house is deteriorating and the Labour government’s punitive death duties. His mother, Mrs Ayres, is in situ: enigmatic, reserved, disquieting and played by Charlotte Rampling . But the real boss is Rod’s hardworking sister, Caroline, outstandingly played by Wilson. She is friendly and unselfconsciously careless of her appearance in ways that will seem eccentric as she grows older, an English countrywoman of the sort imagined by Nancy Mitford. But all three seem to be going slowly mad in their own ways, driven to the brink by something in the house itself.

Faraday’s own secret is that his late mother was a maid at Hundreds Hall and he has come to think of this strange, dilapidated place and its strange, dilapidated family as exemplars of prewar innocence: a bizarre version of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead . And as his friendship with Caroline blossoms into a nervous, protective romance, there is the thrill of a romantic or sexual conquest over his own humble beginnings. But there is something else. Faraday is obsessed with the memory of attending a party there as a child, breaking an ornate picture frame and being caught in the act by Rod and Caroline’s adored sister Suki – who later died of diphtheria at eight years old. Has Faraday’s remembered transgression and present-day quasi-haunting accelerated a supernatural crisis?

Abrahamson shows how the awful tensions and rigidities of the English class system create the right atmosphere of denial – they incubate the horror. A stratum of society that holds on to the past is ripe for haunting. There is an excruciating scene in which Faraday is invited to an evening drinks party there (black tie, naturally) and the other attendees have to be periodically reminded that he is there as a guest, an equal, and no one is ill. But then there is a grisly incident, a moment of nightmarish horror in which Faraday’s qualifications turn out to be vital. It is at an event like this that poor Rod, unable or unwilling to leave his chaotic room, reveals himself to be paralysed with fear at what the house contains.

Wilson’s Caroline is the beating heart of the film and she is superb, not least in a scene at a local dance, where she is thrilled to recognise a female friend from wartime and dances extravagantly with her – to Faraday’s chagrin – hinting at a sexual identity she has concealed from everyone, especially herself. And all the time, the sinister presence in the house grows, like mould on the walls. An elegant, sinister tale of the uncanny, with its own streak of pathos.

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Domhnall Gleeson
Ruth Wilson
Sarah Waters
Charlotte Rampling
The Little Stranger

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Review: In ‘The Little Stranger,’ a Haunted House and a Fading Way of Life

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By A.O. Scott

Aug. 30, 2018

Hundreds Hall is the name of a grand pile of brick in Warwickshire, England, and if you’re moderately familiar with movies and television — “Downton Abbey,” “Crimson Peak,” the “Ghostbusters” reboot — you have no doubt seen hundreds like it. Its sprawling grounds and cavernous rooms evoke ancient aristocratic privilege, but by the late 1940s, when “The Little Stranger” takes place, that grandeur has begun to fade.

Dr. Faraday — we never seem to catch his first name — remembers it well. An ambitious provincial physician whose mother worked as a maid during the house’s glory days under the Ayres family, he looks back fondly on a summer day he spent there in 1919, when he was 8 years old and local commoners were invited to a fair. Now he finds himself treating the remaining members of the Ayreses, who are barely hanging onto their fast-decaying ancestral home.

Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson) is haunted by Hundreds Hall. The Hall itself also seems to be haunted, though it’s not always clear by what or whom. The best guess seems to be a little girl named Suki Ayres, who died shortly after Faraday’s long-ago visit. Her mother (Charlotte Rampling) still lives there, along with her two surviving, grown-up children: Roderick (Will Poulter), who was badly wounded in World War II, and Caroline (Ruth Wilson), “the cleverest of the lot” (according to a family friend), who drifts toward eccentric spinsterhood. The staff has been winnowed to one, a young woman named Betty (Liv Hill), who figures out that something creepy is going on long before anyone else seems to have a clue.

Directed by Lenny Abrahamson (“Room”) and adapted by Lucinda Coxon from Sarah Waters’s skillfully written Gothic novel , “The Little Stranger” is for much of its running time more interested in the sociological and psychological implications of Faraday’s encounter with the Ayreses and their real estate than with any overtly supernatural doings. Faraday, who serves as a possibly unreliable voice-over narrator, is buttoned up as tight as a waistcoat, only sometimes betraying the ruthless effort that his sang-froid requires. He is always aware of being an interloper — a commoner promoted to “one of us” ironically or in emergencies — and his attempts to fit in make this strangeness more glaring.

Mr. Gleeson is adept at this double game. His face is as sharp as a hawk’s but somehow also as soft and unformed as a fledgling sparrow’s. Faraday makes a practice of keeping all feeling in check, presenting himself both as a rational man of science and as the possessor of an exemplary stiff upper lip. As news of the political weather buzzes in the background — the advent of the National Health Service; land sales and tax policies promoted by Clement Attlee’s Labour government — Faraday mourns the waning of old ruling-class prerogatives more plangently than the Ayreses themselves, who would seem to have more to lose. His loyalty to them is more than they deserve or desire.

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Film Review: ‘The Little Stranger’

There's a ghost in the walls of Lenny Abrahamson's elegiac period mystery, but it's Ruth Wilson's performance that does the real haunting.

By Guy Lodge

Film Critic

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'The Little Stranger' Review: An Elegant, Elegiac Gothic Thriller

“Moldy” is not generally an adjective most filmmakers would like to hear directed at their work, yet it applies, rather eerily and gorgeously, to “ The Little Stranger .” Lenny Abrahamson and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon’s refined, deliberate adaptation of Sarah Waters’ neo-Gothic novel has the sense, in style and mood, of having been discovered in a neglected cupboard of a stately home not unlike the one in which it takes place, covered in mossy growth that has left an inerasable sage-green patina on the print. Its characters, too, are dusted down from an era distant from our own, yet it’s clear they creaked with dejection and disuse even in their supposed prime. “The Little Stranger” may be elegantly fashioned as a haunted-house thriller, but the relationships at its core are spooked by sadness well before things start to go bump in the night.

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That may prove a commercial stumbling block to what is otherwise, for Abrahamson, a fine, form-expanding follow-up to the Oscar-approved “Room.” Genre fans in the market for some old-school horror may be surprised to find an undeniably unsettling but sober-sided human study of very English class conflict and aspirational desire, the light supernatural swirlings of which mostly work to aggravate more earthly crises of loneliness, grief and stiff-upper-lipped romance. Adult audiences looking past the gothic trappings, however, will be rewarded with a heritage drama as delicate as the cobwebs in its corners — set a tad off-balance by Domhnall Gleeson ‘s miscasting in the central role of a shy working-class doctor fixated on the tangled domestic woes of his poshest clients, but given a bruised, beating heart by the superb Ruth Wilson , as his wounded object of affection.

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“This house works on people,” says Mrs. Ayres (Charlotte Rampling), withered lady of the manor at Hundreds Hall, a grand but gone-to-seed mansion in England’s Warwickshire district. “Specks of grit, ten years later, leave as pearls.” Her second statement is debatable: The “pearls” emerging from the place, including her trauma-stricken adult children Roderick (Will Poulter) and Caroline (Wilson) and their plainly petrified young housemaid Bette (Liv Hill, a wonderfully expressive newcomer), are cracked and costume-quality at best, the family’s once-lavish fortunes having dwindled to scraps after the Second World War — which has also left Roderick (Will Poulter) disfiguringly battle-scarred, inside and out. Another daughter, Suki, never had the chance to leave, having been felled by diphtheria in childhood, though her spectre of angelic perfection hovers over her younger, less cherished siblings.

But Mrs. Ayres is right about the house’s influence: Hundreds Hall certainly does a number on Faraday (Gleeson), a local villager of humble stock whose mother once worked there as a servant. Enthralled by its opulence as a child, he retains his awe even as he’s invited in as the family physician. A cautious bond steadily builds between him and Caroline, a bright, jaded, friendless young woman amused by the good doctor’s romanticization of their plight, who dreams of a more modern, independent life beyond the Hall’s damp, weary walls. Faraday, for his part, can’t see why she’d want to leave; as their relationship hovers coyly on the brink of something less platonic, it’s unclear whether he’s attracted more to Caroline or the home that’s suffocating her.

Coxon’s patient, literate screenplay astutely preserves the tart class politics of Waters’ novel. The Labour government’s post-war austerity may have stripped the Ayres clan of their material privilege, yet Faraday remains wonderstruck by their legacy, desperate to attach himself to it by any means necessary. When Mrs. Ayres, having invited Faraday to make up the numbers at an ill-fated soiree, passingly refers to him as “one of us,” his sense of achievement is all too heartbreakingly palpable: Can he not see that the Ayreses are effectively living ghosts, left behind by a changing world and confined to the shuttered ruins of past glories? And when the Hall starts showing its own uncanny symptoms of haunting — squiggly scratch marks on the walls, bells ringing out of thin air — is he being warned off or beckoned? From a burgeoning National Health Service to a new housing estate rising from the Ayreses sold-off fields, signs of social progress surround Faraday, yet the onetime servant’s son remains oddly resistant to them all, still beholden to boyish fantasies of wealth.

Whether Gleeson is a slightly awkward fit as Faraday, or simply reading the character’s awkwardness, is hard to say. Poker-straight and sallow, with a neat, pale mustache that seems grown as a stand-in for doctorly authority, he brings the right streak of vulnerability to the doctor’s self-loathing conservatism — but still seems too callow for the part, particularly when the script calls for him to assert a decade’s life experience over Caroline. Either way, Wilson’s extraordinary performance rules the film, weaving a lifetime of accumulating disappointment into a single arched eyebrow. (Her look of droll, pitying disbelief when Faraday remarks on her beauty is a second-long masterclass.) Always best in parts with complex worry lines, Wilson brings an exquisitely ironed-in sense of rueful defeat to a character who would never deem herself sympathetic: She wears her markers of class, from clipped accent to confident gait, in brackets of apology throughout.

As for Hundreds Hall, it may have become critical cliché to refer to locations as characters, but given its shifting psychological impositions on the human ensemble, it’s hard not to see it as such. Production designer Simon Elliott wastes no ashy crevice or cornice of the space, distressing it to dazzling effect in spoiled, soiled shades of green and puce: You can practically see the smoke stains in the velvet upholstery, or the lush woodland murals in the drawing room rotting into real nature. Under the steady, composed gaze of d.p. Ole Bratt Birkeland, in certain shots, even the actors’ faces appear to succumb to verdigris — no accident, one suspects, in a creepingly paced film that takes its time to show how a ruined environment weathers those living, just barely, inside it.

Reviewed at 20th Century Fox screening room, London, June 19, 2018. Running time: 111 MIN.

Production: (U.K.-Ireland) A Focus Features (in U.S.)/Pathé (in U.K.) release of a Pathé, Film4, Ingenious Media presentation of a Potboiler Prods. production in association with Element Pictures, Irish Film Board. (International sales: Pathé International, London.) Producers: Gail Egan, Andrea Calderwood, Ed Guiney. Executive producers: Cameron McCracken, Daniel Battsek, Andrew Lowe, Tim O'Shea. Co-producer: Anita Overland.
Crew: Director: Lenny Abrahamson. Screenplay: Lucinda Coxon, adapted from the novel by Sarah Waters. Camera (color): Ole Bratt Birkeland. Editor: Nathan Nugent. Music: Stephen Rennicks.
With: Domhnall Gleeson, Ruth Wilson, Charlotte Rampling, Will Poulter, Liv Hill , Oliver Zetterström, Kate Phillips, Dixie Egerickx, Josh Dylan.

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The Little Stranger is a quietly brilliant tale of pain, grief, and possibly ghosts

The slow-burn tale filters class concerns through pristine fear.

by Alissa Wilkinson

Domnhall Gleeson in The Little Stranger.

From the moment in The Little Stranger that Dr. Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson) pulls up to Hundreds Hall, a big English manor home that has clearly seen better times, it’s clear that something not entirely normal is going on.

Viewers with a working knowledge of the role that big old family houses play in British literature — particularly in stories set in the 20th century, when old aristocracies and hierarchical norms were taking a beating following the devastations of World War II — will feel the tingle: Hundreds Hall is literally a house, sure, but in this story it’s going to be a lot more. Ghosts both real and metaphorical haunt narratives like these, lurking around corners and making people remember formerly glorious days. At times, they inspire people to act in ways that aren’t entirely rational.

And that’s the idea behind The Little Stranger , based on Sarah Waters’s 2009 gothic novel and adapted by Lucinda Coxon ( The Danish Girl ). It’s a slow-burn horror film, one that has all the sudden scares and moments of pristine fear present in any good movie of its ilk. But in the hands of Lenny Abrahamson ( Room ), The Little Stranger is elevated by measured pacing that also makes the larger house-based metaphor clear — and the result is both elegiac and frightening.

Oliver Zetterström in The Little Stranger.

The Little Stranger is about a once-great house grown shabby, and the family — and its ghosts — that lives within

Faraday, a country physician, has been called to Hundreds Hall to look after the health of Betty (Liv Hill), the teen housemaid. Betty complains of pain and seems frightened, but the family doesn’t mistreat her, and her symptoms clear up fast.

The family of the house is the Ayres, or what’s left of them: Mrs. Ayres (Charlotte Rampling) and her two adult children. Roderick (Will Poulter) was in the Royal Air Force during the war, where he sustained serious injuries, both to his body — which is burned and crippled on one side — and to his mind, tormented by the trauma. And Caroline (the terrific Ruth Wilson) lives at home caring for him and her mother; she, too seems injured in some way, a little hunched and not quite accustomed to having others around.

Dr. Faraday — true, perhaps, to his namesake , the pioneering British scientist who helped discover electromagnetism — suggests treating Roderick’s leg muscles with an innovative new electroshock treatment, which will require him to make several return visits to the house.

That allows Caroline and him to strike up an acquaintance that evolves into something like a friendship, though Faraday is painfully aware that he doesn’t quite fit into the world of the Ayres, even though he is a successful doctor and the family’s formerly posh stature has frayed at the edges over the years.

Domnhall Gleeson and Ruth Wilson star in The Little Stranger.

Faraday is well-versed in the family’s decline because he grew up in the village, and his own mother was a housemaid at Hundreds Hall. Years earlier, as a boy, he visited the place with his mother, and was entranced by the inner workings, even venturing into the hall and stealing a bit of plaster decoration.

Now, strange things are happening in the house. A little girl is injured. There are bumps and ringing bells, unexplained crashes and other occurrences. Faraday, meanwhile, is drawn more and more into the life of the Ayres family. The cause of the mysteries hovers somewhere between science and maybe the supernatural. But there’s a lot that science cannot possibly explain.

The Little Stranger ’s themes wind throughout the story like those of a great book, but the movie uses to the tools of cinema to draw us in

The Little Stranger ’s literary basis is obvious, in the best possible way — its themes are subtly woven throughout the story in complex, subtle layers. Faraday’s name and his use of electricity to bring life back to Roderick’s leg suggests something a little miraculous, but also inexplicable. “It’s like something out of Frankenstein ,” Roderick says when Faraday pulls out the electroshock device, and the way science and technology pop up through the story helps paint a picture of a mid-century England still uncertain about how the explained fits in with the unexplainable.

But the larger themes in the film connect to Hundreds Hall, a once-grand manor that has fallen into some disarray as the fortunes of its inhabits diminish. Yet, as in stories like Brideshead Revisited , the working-class visitor to that world still finds it to be strangely alluring, something he wants to join.

Domnhall Gleeson, Ruth Wilson, and Will Poulter in The Little Stranger.

There’s actually a lot about The Little Stranger that feels similar to Brideshead Revisited , with a key difference: While the latter is about class connected to sexuality and religion, The Little Stranger is about class connected to trauma, grief, and an intense, inexplicable envy.

And, thankfully, The Little Stranger is not just reminiscent of literature; it’s also a good movie , one that makes space for ghosts not just in the plot but in the filmmaking. It strategically avoids showing you too much of anything; sometimes, the camera pushes slowly into an empty room in the shabby Hundreds Hall, making us look all around the frame in search of what we’re meant to be looking at, only to find nothing. Other times, a single shot stands in for an entire sequence of events, forcing us to fill in the gaps with our imaginations and rendering some images much more frightening as a result.

The effect is a film that unfolds sparingly. It gives us only enough to encourage us not to get distracted — this is a film you have to invest in if you want to enjoy its satisfying (if still a little mysterious) conclusion. No gesture or shot feels wasted, especially as Faraday’s character grows more complex, and the ending will make you want to go back to the beginning to look for what you might have missed.

As a comment on shifting post-war class dynamics, The Little Stranger is strong. But as a meditation on how class dynamics shape the emotions of the people who live with them, it’s stellar — especially because it’s cleverly couched in the machinations of a modern ghost story. And marrying social commentary with spookiness doesn’t just make for effective storytelling; it underlines just how frightening it is to live in a world where your station in life controls your happiness.

The Little Stranger opens in theaters on August 31.

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The Little Stranger review: One of the most original British horror films of recent times

Based on the novel by sarah waters, this is a story about class, envy and self-loathing, article bookmarked.

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

The Little Stranger is one of the most original British horror films of recent times – although whether it can really be classified as horror is a moot point. Based on the novel by Sarah Waters, this is a story about class, envy and self-loathing.

It is set in the austerity-era Britain of 1948, when the country was in debt and drained of colour and when the old aristocracy was on its knees. Beautifully directed by Lenny Abrahamson, the film evokes this period in a way that is both nostalgic and frequently chilling.

Domhnall Gleeson plays the youngish Dr Faraday, an aloof and diffident figure who has opportunities in Clement Attlee’s Britain that would have been denied him before the war. He is from a very humble background, the son of a housemaid, but has risen up the social scale and is now a fully qualified country doctor.

Faraday has a morbid obsession with Hundreds, the decaying, Brideshead-like pile where his mother worked before he was born. He has vivid memories of visiting the country house for an Empire Day celebration as a child in 1919 when it was still in its pomp. His mother had friends working there and he was allowed inside. What he can’t acknowledge, and what the film takes a long time to tell us about, is his vicious resentment and loathing of his upper class patrons.

Abrahamson shows Gleeson as the type who will always lurk in the corner at any social event. He is an awkward and repressed man but seemingly a decent and sympathetic one. With his red hair and pale face, he is not handsome at all. Nor is he charming but he does have a good bedside manner. He is the type others feel comfortable confiding in but who will rarely share any secrets about himself.

The Ayres family, the owners of Hundreds, are in dire financial straits. They can’t afford the death duties on the house. The son of the family, Roderick (Will Poulter), is scarred and near crippled by war wounds. The mother, Mrs Ayres (Charlotte Rampling) is haughty in a Miss Havisham-like way but even she is struggling to keep up appearances.

The daughter, Caroline (Ruth Wilson), is spirited and intelligent but seems to have been left behind by the world. Their once grand home isn’t just shabby and falling apart. It appears to be haunted. Mrs Ayres’ beloved daughter Susan (‘Suki’), who came face to face with Faraday on his visit to the house, died as a child. Her spirit seems to be behind the strange and terrifying happenings in the house.

Abrahamson shows an anthropologist’s eye in the detail with which he depicts the aristocratic family fallen on hard times but desperately trying to cling to its status and dignity. The Ayres can’t pay their bills. They’ve lost the “trick of company” but they have their codes of behaviour.

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Try as he might, Faraday can’t crack them. In their eyes, he will always be a “common village boy.” Lucinda Coxon’s screenplay picks up on the tiny mannerisms and tics of speech that distinguish the Ayres from less well-born outsiders like Faraday.

This is as much an account of a thwarted love affair as it is a ghost story. If it wasn’t so awkward, there would be a certain humour in Faraday’s courtship of Caroline. He is gauche but very dogged. The misfortunes that multiply around her give him his chance. It is not clear, though, whether he is in love with her or is looking to control her.

The mood here is similar to that in The Innocents , Jack Clayton’s film adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn Of The Screw . We don’t see any monsters. The terror is in the minds of the protagonists.

Abrahamson includes a few familiar devices from more conventional haunted house stories – bells in the servants’ quarters that ring of their own accord, doors that will suddenly slam shut, fires that start from nowhere. Generally, though, the creaks aren’t in the night but are in the tormented psyches of the film’s main protagonists.

The Little Stranger doesn’t scare us as often as might have been expected but it is still a disturbing affair. It’s a ghost story in which politics, class and money are the most frightening elements. Domhnall Gleeson may be best known for playing General Hux in Star Wars but he was superb as the traumatised, shell-shocked AA Milne in last year’s Goodbye Christopher Robin .

He gives an equally affecting performance here as the repressed and uptight Dr Faraday. He is matched by Ruth Wilson as Caroline, the “awfully brainy” upper class girl treated in such chauvinistic fashion by all the men around her. Wilson shows us Caroline’s resilience, her passion and her fatalism. She is as much a prisoner in the house as any princess in a castle in a fairy tale.

The Little Stranger has received a very muted response in the US, where it was released late last month. It is too idiosyncratic and subdued to appeal to fans of the teen-oriented horror movies that dominate the box office. Abrahamson’s approach is the polar opposite to that found in Jason Blum movies. This, though, is a consummately crafted and very subtle film which ends with quite a kick.

'The Little Stranger' is in cinemas from 21 September

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A ghost is something that should not be, intruding on a world it does not belong to. A ghost is an interloper. The same could be said of rigid social hierarchies, especially like the mid-20th century ones depicted in Lenny Abrahamson ’s adaptation of The Little Stranger . It’s a movie obsessed with class and the shifting power structures of post-war England where the aristocracy has largely faded and professionals like doctors are rising. The subtext is certainly interesting, and it’s clever to tell this shift within the context of a ghost story, and yet the movie lacks an emotional punch to hammer home its observations.

Dr. Faraday ( Domhnall Gleeson ) is a physician working in the English countryside when he’s called to check in on the tenets of the dilapidated Hundreds Hall, a fading manor where his mother once worked as a housemaid. There he tends for the Ayres family, including Caroline ( Ruth Wilson ), who catches Faraday’s eye; her brother Roderick ( Will Poulter ), a badly scarred veteran suffering from war shock; and their mother Mrs. Ayres ( Charlotte Rampling ). However, whenever Faraday comes to call on the Ayres family, strange and horrible things start to happen that might be connected to the ghost of the Suki Ayres, a deceased sibling of Caroline and Roderick who died before either were born.

However, it becomes clear fairly early on (especially if you notice the acorn in the title card) that the “Little Stranger” refers not to the late Suki Ayres, but more appropriately to Faraday. Faraday is obsessed not so much with the Ayres family but with what they represent. He fondly remembers a day from his childhood thirty years prior where he and his mother were invited to Hundreds Hall and he briefly tasted the life of the aristocracy. The person haunting the Ayres doesn’t seem to be so much the ghost of little Suki Ayres, but Faraday, who wants to climb beyond his station even though he is objectively more powerful than the faded Ayres clan and their rundown manor.

And yet once you’ve put all the pieces together, there’s not much that’s satisfying about The Little Stranger . I love gothic horror stories, but Abrahamson never leans enough into the horror to make the film particularly scary or haunting even though Faraday is a creep, and the period details are too bogged down in the horror mystery to ever really come alive. It’s a movie with a very clear subtext on its mind, but once you acknowledge that subtext, there’s nowhere to go any further with it. Perhaps English viewers will get more out of the experience, but the specificity of the conflict ends up working against the emotional impact of the picture.

the-little-stranger-ruth-wilson-domhnall-gleeson

It doesn’t help that The Little Stranger is an extremely cold picture, from the performances to the cinematography to the music. It’s a movie that’s meant to put you at a distance. Perhaps it’s so that we feel the distance between Faraday and his desire to be an aristocrat, but it fills the movie with stagnant air, like it’s afraid to breathe for fear of being seen as human. The story tells you the emotions, and because you can see everything telegraphed out, it makes for a rigid, lifeless picture that has more on its mind than it has in its heart. You don’t really feel for anyone in this movie, but you do come away thinking a bit about class distinctions.

The Little Stranger is a movie that could best be described as “interesting.” It’s got something on its mind, but what’s there isn’t particularly deep or intriguing. It’s a clever concept and conceit, but it doesn’t serve much, and Abrahamson plays his film so quietly that it never raises above a whisper. You’re left wondering what kind of impact The Little Stranger was supposed to leave. Sadly, The Little Stranger is so hushed, quiet, and diminutive, that it’s hard to see much of anything at all.

Charlotte Rampling

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, chaz's journal, great movies, contributors, peeling back the true horror of the little stranger.

There's a sinister secret nested snugly at the center of Lenny Abrahamson's " The Little Stranger ." In trailers, this adaptation of Sarah Waters' novel seems a spooky haunted house tale set in the austere decadence of early Windsor-era England. For most of its runtime, the film appears a gothic romance in which the mild-mannered Doctor Faraday ( Domhnall Gleeson ) must combat the unknown evil inhabiting the illustrious Hundreds Hall so he might marry its gruff but lovable heiress, Caroline Ayres ( Ruth Wilson ). But the haunting final image of "The Little Stranger" reveals something more cerebral and starkly feminist is at play within this unconventional horror story.

"The Little Stranger" reveals the Ayres tragedy through the eyes of Faraday, a "common village boy" who grew up in the shadow of Hundreds Hall and became a respected doctor with a gentleman's manners. Through a reserved voiceover, he introduces audiences to the once affluent family whose fortunes have fallen—as their once pristine home has—into ruin. Still, Faraday is enchanted by the old house and by Caroline, a "terribly brainy girl" on the verge of spinsterhood, having squandered her promise and youth looking after her mother ( Charlotte Rampling ) and war-wounded brother Roderick ( Will Poulter ). Stoic and stalwart, Faraday provides a shoulder to cry on, a voice of reason, and even his hand in marriage. But he is not to be trusted by the Ayres or us. For Faraday is not the romantic hero he paints himself as, but an unreliable narrator and the source of the spiteful spirit that torments the Ayres to death because of a ferocious form of toxic masculinity.

The final shot of the film reveals that the poltergeist of Hundreds Halls was a manifestation of Faraday's decades-long desire to possess the grand home. His passion for the place grew into an intense sense of male entitlement, believing deeply he was owed the thing as a reward for wanting it so desperately. And so a territorial and violent force was sparked. Over drinks, a colleague explains that extreme negative emotions can cause a subconscious break that could birth a poltergeist. For Faraday, this fateful moment occurred 30 years before, when he first snuck into the exquisite foyer of Hundreds Hall and broke a plaster acorn from its elaborate décor. In flashback, a foreboding rumbling precedes the horrid crack of plaster. Recalling it to Caroline, he rationalizes, "I wasn't trying to vandalize. I was overcome." Faraday compares himself to a lovesick man stealing a lock of hair from the woman he fancies. Caught up in his own desires, he ignores the violation and theft entailed in each act, reframing it as romantic and himself as the helpless victim of passion. As absurd as it seems, Faraday basically victim blames the house for his violation of it, suggesting Hundreds Hall was dressed too provocatively to be left unmolested.

Faraday believes his passion for the house excuses this crime. But there will be more. And they will become more violent. The first victim of his poltergeist is young Suki Ayres, punished for witnessing his embarrassment at being slapped by his mother for his vandalism. Mrs. Ayres notes that was the very day her beloved first-born became mysteriously ill, before withering away to death. While Faraday went off to grow up and become a doctor, his poltergeist has lurked in the house, quietly resenting its residents. Upon his return to the village, the paranormal activity at the Hundreds Hall becomes more aggressive, a coincidence Caroline remarks on without understanding its significance. It was a poltergeist outburst that led to Betty calling for a doctor, which brought Faraday to the Ayres door. Every paranormal event after that can be seen as violent retaliations whenever Faraday feels rejected.

The first comes during a cocktail party, where a little girl is abruptly mauled by Caroline's dog. The timing suggests this is no accident. Though the girl has been pestering the pet relentlessly, its off-screen attack occurs the moment after Faraday realizes the event is a matchmaking setup meant to pair Caroline with an arrogant, new-money ad-man. The hurt to his pride is taken out on the pretty blond girl, just as it was with Suki. The gruesome and inexplicable assault benefits Faraday three-fold. It scares off the would-be suitor, gives the doctor a chance to impress by swooping in to mend the wounded child, and offers an excuse to euthanize Caroline's beloved pet, eliminating one more rival for her affections. Whether Faraday realizes it or not, he is working in tandem with his poltergeist to achieve Hundreds Hall. When the polite and socially acceptable methods fail, his subconscious lashes out in violence. And their next obstacle and target will be Rod.

Through voiceover, Faraday expresses a thinly veiled disdain for the limping man of the house, sneering, "I couldn't help but think the house deserved better." Implied is that Faraday is the better the house deserves. After all, Faraday is a dapper and dashing gentleman, while Rod a marred, drunken recluse with no hopes of finding a wife. Using his position as a trusted friend of the family and respected doctor, Faraday pushes to have Rod committed, arguing his plans to sell off part of the estate are deranged. When this fails, his poltergeist sets Rod's bedroom ablaze, nearly killing him and making him seem an unhinged danger to himself and others. So, Mrs. Ayres and Caroline take Faraday's recommendation and have their lone male heir exiled. The very next scene shows Faraday, smiling like the cat who caught the canary, as he cuts the Christmas roast. Blithely taking over the role of man of the house, he rejoices in voiceover, "It made me feel—just for a moment—a part of the life of the house."

With Rod out of the way, Faraday ramps up his efforts to woo and wed Caroline, taking her to a dance, where his POV shot of watching her dance feels ominous, like a predator zeroing in on his prey. "What the house needs is a dose of happiness," he crows in his marriage proposal. But after Mrs. Ayres makes it clear that Faraday would only get this house over her dead body, his poltergeist terrorizes her with chilling sounds and vicious cuts, driving her to suicide. And once Caroline rejects him too, her death is imminent.

After she breaks off their engagement, Faraday laments, "Hundreds Hall was lost to me … as was Caroline." At this moment, our unreliable narrator's true priorities are laid bare. This was never a love story about boy meets girl, but boy meets house. Caroline was a tool to him. That the object of Faraday's desires is a house and not actually Caroline emphasizes the dehumanizing nature of male entitlement, as entitled men do not regard the women they crave as people who have autonomy and the right to reject them, but as a thing they can grab. Their desire outweighs the feelings of its object. But once Faraday realizes that his manipulations and social niceties have failed to win him the prize of the girl—and by extension the house—his cool veneer cracks, unleashing into a flurry of fists and shouting in his car while his poltergeist pushes Caroline to her fatal fall off the balcony.

Through his plaintive voiceover, Faraday would have us believe that he is a romantic hero who fought for love and lost. He and his poltergeist never come face-to-face in the film, so perhaps he truly believes it. But "The Little Stranger" sees through his subterfuge. For even if Faraday is completely ignorant of how his true intentions influence the poltergeist, he knowingly uses his position of power as a doctor, a friend, and a gentleman to manipulate the Ayres to reach for his goal, no matter the cost. Yet there are moments where it seems he has some hint.

Looking back on his first day at Hundreds Hall, Faraday says, "I could not help but imagine I belonged. A proper little gentleman. Of course, I was no such thing." On the surface, it appears he's speaking about how his clothes made this commoner seem suitably posh. But on reflection, this line also speaks to his façade of gentility in adulthood. Outwardly, Faraday is calm, patient, and magnanimous toward the Ayres family. Hidden is his dangerous dark side that would rather see them dead than reject him, that would rather see Hundreds Hall abandoned than without him. Worse still, Faraday gets away with all his crimes, because who would believe such a nice, respectable man could be capable of such evil?

"The Little Stranger" is a horror story not about evil spirits or haunted houses, but about the too real terror born from toxic masculinity, which blinds men to their trespasses and threatens women with objectification and violence. The film sounds a warning, begging some to look past the nice guy veneers, and others to search the darkest corners of their desires. For we are not always the heroes we imagine ourselves to be.

Kristy Puchko

Kristy Puchko is a New York-based film critic and entertainment reporter whose work has appeared on RogerEbert.com, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Vulture, Mel Magazine, The Playlist, IGN, and Pajiba.

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The Little Stranger Review

21 Sep 2018

The Little Stranger

Adapting a Booker Prize-shortlisted novel seems like a surprisingly safe choice for Lenny Abrahamson , after the confines of Room and the subversive weirdness of Frank . But there’s something strange and slippery about his adaptation of Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger that reveals it to be a better fit for the director than you’d imagine — something off-kilter and unsettling, even if it isn’t quite up to his best work.

Domhnall Gleeson is on brittle-accented, reined-in form as Faraday, the young doctor who takes a post in the small town where he once grew up. Nearby is Hundreds Hall, and Faraday is called to the estate to examine housemaid Betty (Liv Hill), who has apparently experienced ghostly goings-on. But it’s badly burned war veteran Roderick Ayers ( Poulter ) and his sister Caroline ( Wilson ) who catch his attention. Faraday treats Roderick’s wounds and befriends the lonely Caroline, making himself indispensable. Still, as the son of a former servant, he wonders if he can he ever belong among the gentry.

The cast are superb, but with characters this stiff there are only glimpses of emotion.

This is a film that’s as much about class, then, as about ghosts, and it’s at its best when dealing with insecurity. Faraday hungers for Hundreds Hall in a way he can’t quite voice, and that extends to its residents. Roderick — angry, unpredictable and in pain — is caught between his duty to the estate and a creeping sense that it’s doomed whatever he does. Caroline gave up her own life to care for her wounded brother and now seems destined for spinsterhood. And their mother Mrs Ayers ( Rampling ) prefers to live in the past, covering up the house’s crumbling edges to throw sparsely attended parties.

Whether or not there really is a malignant ghost in the manor — a question the film tackles more explicitly than the book — this is a family haunted by the long-ago death of Mrs Ayers’ elder daughter Susan, and by their own glorious past. Hundreds Hall is an empty pile doomed to decline as more egalitarian times dawn, and its inhabitants, especially Caroline, are brutally aware of that fact. Only Faraday romanticises the Hall, perhaps because he doesn’t have to pay the bills.

As the old pile enters its final chapter, Abrahamson finds creepy texture in its peeling paint and battered wood, and Ole Bratt Birkeland’s cinematography creates an effectively chilly atmosphere. But it’s perhaps a little too cold to draw us in. The cast are all superb, but with characters this stiff, and stiff-upper-lipped, there are only glimpses of emotion to keep us engaged in this gothic tale. It’s not until relatively late in the story that we realise the depths of their desires, or the destructive power that they hold.

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The little stranger.

Common Sense Says
Parents Say 1 Review
Kids Say 0 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Well-made gothic noir has scares, bloody scenes.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 15+?

A small girl is mauled by a dog (largely offscreen); she's shown with bloody wou

Couple briefly shown kissing and groping in a car (she stops him from going furt

Single uses of "ass," "hell."

A young girl drinks alcohol at a party and claims she once smoked a cigarette. C

Any Positive Content?

Themes of class, of being born to a "lower" section of society and coveting the

One character is a doctor, but he's very stiff and cold, with a nonexistent beds

Violence & Scariness

A small girl is mauled by a dog (largely offscreen); she's shown with bloody wounds and blood puddles/stains all around. A woman with bloody hands/wrists, with broken glass nearby. Characters die. A main character is covered with burn scars. Characters rage, with one smashing a drinking glass on the ground. Dog put to sleep via injection. Room on fire. Mother slaps a young boy. Scary noises/scary stuff.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Couple briefly shown kissing and groping in a car (she stops him from going further). Reference to a man being an "octopus," (i.e., hands all over the girls). Other brief, sex-related dialogue.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

A young girl drinks alcohol at a party and claims she once smoked a cigarette. Character gulps down whiskey after being rejected. Adults drink socially (brandy, etc.) and smoke.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Themes of class, of being born to a "lower" section of society and coveting the things that wealthy people have -- but it's more of a suggestion than a discussion; no clear takeaways.

Positive Role Models

One character is a doctor, but he's very stiff and cold, with a nonexistent bedside manner. He helps people get well, but he doesn't seem to be doing it for the betterment of humankind ... it's just his job. Another character is a war hero, but he's tragic, wounded, suffering. Other characters don't do much at all.

Parents need to know that The Little Stranger is a gothic noir film that's set in the 1940s and based on a novel by Sarah Waters. There's a lot of blood: A little girl is mauled by a dog (the mauling happens offscreen, but she's shown with bloody wounds), characters are sliced open by broken glass, and characters die. One person is covered in burn scars, a mother slaps a young boy, and characters sometimes rage angrily, smashing glasses or gulping down whiskey. A young girl is seen drinking alcohol at a party and claims to have smoked a cigarette. There are also scenes of adults drinking socially and smoking; language is limited to single uses of "ass" and "hell." A man and a woman kiss and grope each other in a car, and there's some sex-related dialogue. The movie is well made but perhaps also a little stiff for some genre fans; still, older teens and up with sophisticated tastes may like it. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

Parents say (1)

Based on 1 parent review

What's the Story?

In THE LITTLE STRANGER, it's 1947, and Dr. Faraday ( Domhnall Gleeson ) is called out to the crumbling Ayres mansion to check on the family's maid. Faraday once spent a memorable day at the mansion as a boy, and it still holds a strong fascination for him. Faraday realizes he can help Roderick Ayres ( Will Poulter ), who suffers from burns and other war-related injuries, and starts coming back to the house for treatments. Faraday also becomes drawn to Roderick's sister, Caroline ( Ruth Wilson ). But as he continues to visit -- and as his attraction for Caroline grows -- strange things begin happening in the house, from mysterious scribblings on the walls to servants' bells ringing on their own. When Mrs. Ayres ( Charlotte Rampling ) has a deadly, ghostly encounter, Faraday must confront whatever is at the heart of the matter.

Is It Any Good?

Adapted from a novel by Sarah Waters, this gothic noir is well made, with eerie camera moves and cuts, but it also seems stuck in an air of tastefulness; it never manages to get the blood flowing. Written by Lucinda Coxon ( The Danish Girl ) and directed by Lenny Abrahamson ( Room ), The Little Stranger could have been a fun, prickly story of ghostly happenings, but its makers seem to shy away from any elements that would turn it into a horror movie. It's a movie that would much rather be taken quite seriously.

Gleeson plays his role stiffly, perhaps trying to capture a sense of class differences but also covering up Faraday's feelings of unease or passion. Scenes between him and Wilson could have been emotionally complex, with more push-and-pull, but they largely come across as numb. And because the story is told through Faraday's visiting point of view, the movie seems constructed in blocky chunks. Yet Abrahamson's setups and cutting are often expertly chosen, and he does create truly fluid moments of unease, as well as a mind-bender of an ending.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the violence in The Little Stranger . Is it meant to be gruesome or to cause thrills and squeals? How can you tell?

How does the movie depict drinking and smoking ? Why is the little girl allowed to drink at the party? What lessons are learned (if any)?

What is a "gothic" story? What makes it different from other kinds of horror/mystery stories? What's the appeal?

Why is it sometimes fun to be scared?

Movie Details

In theaters : August 31, 2018
On DVD or streaming : November 27, 2018
Cast : Domhnall Gleeson , Ruth Wilson , Will Poulter
Director : Lenny Abrahamson
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Focus Features
Genre : Drama
Topics : Book Characters
Run time : 111 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : some disturbing bloody images
Last updated : October 8, 2022

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Cast & crew
User reviews

Metacritic reviews

The little stranger.

100 Washington Post Alan Zilberman Washington Post Alan Zilberman As a director, Abrahamson uses that sense of the detached observer as a scalpel, whittling away at our expectations of horror films until we have no choice but to look at — and really listen to — what is happening. It’s an approach that requires patience, on his part and ours, but the rewards are worth it.
80 The Guardian Peter Bradshaw The Guardian Peter Bradshaw The Little Stranger is fluently made and really well acted, particularly by Ruth Wilson, though maybe a bit too constrained by period-movie prestige to be properly scary.
80 Vox Alissa Wilkinson Vox Alissa Wilkinson It’s a slow-burn horror film, one that has all the sudden scares and moments of pristine fear present in any good movie of its ilk. But in the hands of Lenny Abrahamson (Room), The Little Stranger is elevated by measured pacing that also makes the larger house-based metaphor clear — and the result is both elegiac and frightening.
80 Arizona Republic Bill Goodykoontz Arizona Republic Bill Goodykoontz Gleeson is terrific as Faraday struggles — with his feelings for Caroline, with her feelings for him, with the notion that some of what’s going on at Hundreds Hall may not have a rational explanation. The evolution of his character is subtle, but hauntingly effective.
75 The Seattle Times Moira Macdonald The Seattle Times Moira Macdonald The Little Stranger is a haunted-house movie, but not one with cheap scares. In fact there are few scares at all — it’s mostly just an atmosphere of lingering, musty dread — and horror-movie fans should be warned that it’s all quite subtle. But it’s haunting, in its quiet way.
70 Village Voice Bilge Ebiri Village Voice Bilge Ebiri Like many gothic tales, The Little Stranger hangs tantalizingly between genres: It has elements of haunted house thriller, of doomed romance, of psychological thriller, of historical allegory.
70 The New York Times A.O. Scott The New York Times A.O. Scott The twisting and cracking of the British class system is always fascinating to observe, and The Little Stranger traces the details of its chosen moment of social change with precision and subtlety, and with its own layers of somewhat dubious nostalgia.
63 The Associated Press Lindsey Bahr The Associated Press Lindsey Bahr All in all, it’s just a little underdeveloped. Perhaps in novel form its polite pace and subtle revelations made a certain amount of sense, but the movie is lacking.
42 The Film Stage Jose Solís The Film Stage Jose Solís It fails as an insightful look at the class system in England because it sees every party with utmost contempt.
42 IndieWire Eric Kohn IndieWire Eric Kohn Abrahamson seems so coy about the haunting of the Ayres’ house that he refuses to allow the movie’s strongest aspect to take center stage, and the perils of The Little Stranger hover aimlessly throughout the movie like a specter in search of some elusive white light.
See all 37 reviews on Metacritic.com
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The Little Stranger Review

Subtlety is often a defining element for a horror movie. There are thousands of bombastic, scream-in-your face features that take the intensity to 11 at the start and break off the knob; but those titles can be balanced by stories that are not so much about shrieks and scares, but instead sending chills down the spine. Both have equal merit, but also attract audiences on different sides of the spectrum: some don't go to the movies to feel like they've bathed in blood, and others don't have the patience for slow-burn. If you're a person who fits into the latter category, Lenny Abrahamson's The Little Stranger may not be for you; however, if you're tastes gravitate towards haunting mysteries about the depths and darkness of human desire, however, then this is a film to which you should sprint.

The work marks Abrahamson's debut in the genre -- the filmmaker in the past few years bringing us the delightfully oddball comedy Frank , and the powerful, Oscar-winning drama Room -- and what he weaves is a spectacularly atmospheric, engaging, and twisting tale that packs an ending that will have you talking for days. It's deliberate in its storytelling, and may not fully satisfy those who watch horror for the bloodletting, but those willing to invest in it will be immensely rewarded, as it's a rich cinematic experience that is sullenly gorgeous, challenging, and even surprisingly relevant in its themes.

Adapted by Lucinda Coxon, based on the novel of the same name by author Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger transports us back to the 1940s in Warwickshire, England, finding a straight-laced, stoic doctor named Faraday ( Domhnall Gleeson ) requested for a house call at a dilapidated mansion called Hundreds Hall. While treating a young maid who complains about the residence's dark energy, the physician gets to know the Ayres family -- a clan long past its glory days. Caroline Ayres (Ruth Wilson) is the head of the household, as her mother (Charlotte Rampling) hasn't been entirely put together since the death of her young daughter, Susan; and her brother, Roderick ( Will Poulter ), wears both serious physical and emotional scars of war.

Having been brought up as part of the lower class and looking back at a single childhood visit to Hundreds Hall as a life-changing event, Faraday begins an obsession with the Ayres clan -- though that decision is heavily questioned. After all, it's family beset by enough tragedy to begin talks of a curse. Still, the doctor's fixation continues, particularly through courtship of Caroline, but as time goes on it becomes increasingly clear that something unnatural, or supernatural, is at play.

The Little Stranger plays with a lot of respect for the viewer and zero scenes with long, drawn-out explanations, but an attentive audience will get a great deal from the experience. Both Lenny Abrahamson's direction and Lucinda Coxon's script are filled with wonderful and carefully placed details that provide the necessary insight to navigate the story -- and while all of the clues are there for you to take in over the course of the runtime, it's all so artfully done that the ending remains completely unpredictable. It not only provides a wonderful shock to ingest as the credits roll, but it immediately causes a craving for a second viewing, so that you can see how all of those aforementioned details play with a totally different context.

The movie marks a reunion between Lenny Abrahamson and Domhnall Gleeson, who previously worked together on Frank , and while the two projects couldn't be more different tonally, one area where they overlap is featuring a tremendous performance from the Irish actor. There are links between the characters, as both are hungry for something that exists beyond their grasp, but what Gleeson brings to The Little Stranger is deeper and darker. It's a challenging part, as Faraday is taken down a complicated emotional path in his relationship with Caroline, but the star also focuses our attention with his underlying passion and shared curiosity in the larger mystery.

Part of what's great about The Little Stranger continuing Lenny Abrahamson's eclectic run as a director is that it's allowed him another unique aesthetic with which to experiment, and the gothic horror genre has allowed him, like with Room , to create something that is exquisitely and darkly beautiful. Hundreds Hall is a stunning estate with spectacular and memorable design -- an extension of Faraday's passion -- and on a broader level the film is gorgeous and transporting as a period piece. And while the larger approach is more about unnerving the audience than scaring, there are particular scenes (which I won't spoil here), that deliver an impressive and lasting shock.

Not everyone is going to be on board with it, but The Little Stranger is a film that you have to give yourself over to and live in. It's methodical storytelling, but also spectacularly rich and fulfilling, right up to its perfectly mysterious conclusion that demands further engagement and discussion. It's quiet and subtle, but it packs a great punch, and is a wonderful and different addition to the ongoing horror renaissance.

Eric Eisenberg is the Assistant Managing Editor at CinemaBlend. After graduating Boston University and earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism, he took a part-time job as a staff writer for CinemaBlend, and after six months was offered the opportunity to move to Los Angeles and take on a newly created West Coast Editor position. Over a decade later, he's continuing to advance his interests and expertise. In addition to conducting filmmaker interviews and contributing to the news and feature content of the site, Eric also oversees the Movie Reviews section, writes the the weekend box office report (published Sundays), and is the site's resident Stephen King expert. He has two King-related columns.

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The Little Stranger ending explained: Is there really a ghost in the house?

The Little Stranger, the gothic film starring Domhnall Gleeson and Ruth Wilson, had a peculiar ending

17:15, 24 Sep 2018
Updated 21:57, 13 Feb 2021

The film The Little Stranger has hit UK cinemas and is based on the best-selling book by author Sarah Waters .

It follows former working class boy Dr. Faraday ( Domhnall Gleeson ) as he returns to a grand aristocratic home he knew from his childhood, where he meets the troubled Ayres family, and grows close to the daughter of the house, Caroline ( Ruth Wilson ).

However, there appears to be secrets in not just the house's history, but the Ayres' past, and also that of Faraday's childhood and connection there.

We were fans of the film over here at Mirror Online, saying it was "a subtle ghost story with class at its core" in our review.

Whether you have seen the film and need some more answers, or you just like some spoilers, then read on to find out what exactly happened in The Little Stranger.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Last chance!

Okay, let's get started.

Was there a ghost in Hundreds Hall?

Yes, there are definitive signs of this considering the doors slamming and locking, bells ringing, strange sounds coming through the communicator lines through the house and the strange markings occurring around the house.

We don't have a definitive answer of who the poltergeist is, but Ayres matriarch Angela ( Charlotte Rampling ) was convinced that it was the ghost of her dead daughter, Susan, who died before the birth of Caroline and her son Roderick ( Will Poulter ).

Director Lenny Abrahamson confirmed there was a haunting but also left it open as to what it was when speaking to Thrillist .

"There is a ghost. Or there is a thing in the house. As Will Poulter says in the character of Roddy: "There is a thing in this house that hates us." I think whether it hates them is a question you could ask, but I think there is a thing in the house."

There is an idea from the director on the source of that evil, but read on for more...

What happened to the Ayres family?

Convinced of being haunted by her dead child, Angela proceeded to kill herself with broken glass from a picture frame.

The scarred and wounded Ayres heir Roderick was committed to an asylum due to the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder form his experiences in the Second World War, the symptoms of which saw him set alight to his own room.

Dr. Faraday had grown close to the family and treated both Roderick and Angela, but was unable to save them.

Faraday grew ever closer to Caroline who was left traumatised and depressed at what happened to her family, but had plans to sell the rest of the estate to property developers after she broke off her engagement to Faraday, who she did not love as much as he did.

Before she could leave, however, Caroline was troubled by noises in the house and confronted something on the upper floors.

Upon seeing it, she exclaimed "You!" before being flung down the flight of stairs to her death.

Who killed Caroline Ayres?

This is left ambiguous, but there are a few options.

Faraday testifies at an inquest that it is likely that Caroline committed suicide, but the film shows this not to be the case.

The doctor may have not wanted to believe that supernatural forces were responsible, but he may also have had a hand in her demise considering she broke off their engagement.

Yet, Abrahamson says that the evil force in the house may have taken on the form of Faraday in killing Caroline.

" [Faraday] says he sees something distorted in [Caroline's] eyes. So we imagined it as a kind of monstrous or deformed version of Faraday. That's how it manifested itself to her.

"Put it like this: How does this thing in the house show itself to all the characters? So to Roddy, who obviously was in a fireball of a plane crash, it shows itself 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 show the boy."

The director told

t that the ambiguity of this was intentional though and he wanted the possibilities left open.

"I don't want to ram that down anybody's throat."

What did the final shot mean?

At the end of the film, Dr. Faraday said a final farewell to Hundreds Hall, but as he left he was watched by the spectre of himself as a young child - at the age of and in the clothes that he wore when he visited the house as a child and stole part of the plaster fixtures of the house.

Abrahamson again offered an explanation for that choice of the final image.

" I suppose what that image of the boy at the end is saying is that the force in the house is something that came from the child.

"There's a scene earlier on with the other doctor in the pub. Faraday and he are discussing whether or not, under significant pressure, the subconscious might somehow fracture from the conscious and become a force by itself. At the moment where the boy breaks the acorn, that's the moment at which his rage, desire, impotent longing, and knowledge that he'll never be accepted [fractured].

"That's where that happens and that's where you feel the house has absorbed something. And that's what lives in it. And the image of the boy is a kind of representation of that. We're not saying that it was the physical boy [that pushed Caroline]. We're saying that it was something of him."

What are the underlying themes and message of the film?

Finally, Abrahamson also told Thrillist what he was drawn to in Waters' novel and what he set out to portray in his film.

"The book moved me because Faraday's character - even though he is terribly repressed and sometimes sort of jarring or that lovely word "rebarbative" -- is just like all of us, somebody who started out wanting to be loved and to love.

"That class system is the warping dimension. This is a film set in Britain in the mid-'40s which is about class, but actually any ideology or social kind of structure, which diminishes one group of people and elevates another, is ultimately profoundly destructive at a personal level to both sides of that."

Quite the weighty film!

The Little Stranger is in cinemas now.

What did you think of the film? Let us know in the comments below.

MORE ON Films Ruth Wilson Sarah Waters Domhnall Gleeson Charlotte Rampling Will Poulter

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‘The Little Stranger’ Review: A Haunting Meditation on Time

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

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.

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The crow 2024's debut audience score rt triples critic score (& breaks franchise trend), alien: romulus box office hits a huge global milestone, passing both ridley scott & james cameron-directed classics, the little stranger is a gripping adaptation that's more gothic drama than horror-thriller, but may haunt you long after its credits are done rolling..

Much like Lenny Abrahamson's last two directorial efforts ( Frank and the Oscar-winning Room ), The Little Stranger is a film that defies easy labels and genre convention, in the very best ways. Based on the 2009 novel by Sarah Waters, this spooky historical offering was adapted for the big screen by Lucinda Coxon - a playwright/screenwriter who has demonstrated a knack for both socially conscious period pieces ( The Danish Girl ) and set design-heavy Gothic melodrama (see her uncredited efforts on Crimson Peak ). The movie similarly plays to Abrahmson's strengths as a filmmaker who specializes in stories about people tormented by the personal horrors and traumas from their past. This in turn makes the project the perfect match for this particular writer/director pairing. The Little Stranger is a gripping adaptation that's more Gothic drama than horror-thriller, but may haunt you long after its credits are done rolling.

Set in England in the summer of 1948, The Little Stranger unfolds from the perspective of Dr. Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson): a man from humble beginnings who has since made his name as a well-respected and accomplished country doctor. One day, he is called upon to treat a patient - namely, the housemaid Betty (Liv Hill) - at Hundreds Hall: a once luxurious estate that has fallen into disrepair, now that the formerly wealthy Ayres family (the Hall's owners for centuries) are no longer able to sustain their way of life in the post-WWII world. However, Faraday's connection to this place actually goes all the way back to 1919, when he first laid eyes on it as a child, some years after his working-class mother served there as a housemaid herself.

Over the course of his followup visits to the Hall, Faraday grows closer to the Ayres clan by treating their grown son Roderick (Will Poulter) for the debilitating injuries he suffered in the Royal Air Force, and befriending their matriarch, Mrs. Ayres (Charlotte Rampling). Faraday likewise begins to form a connection with Mrs. Ayres' daughter, Caroline (Ruth Wilson), that gradually starts to evolve into something romantic, despite their differences in class. All the same, the Ayres can't shake the feeling that there's an ominous presence in their house that wishes them nothing but misfortune... and may have something to do with the young girl that Faraday encountered as a child when he visited the Hall, all those years ago.

Like Waters' book, Coxon's adapted script folds themes about the changes in class structure in post-WWII England into a Gothic narrative that quietly subverts certain tropes of the genre, yet is drawn in the same classical style as famous period dramas and supernatural horror stories that have come before it ( Brideshead Revisited and The Turn of the Screw , for example). While The Little Stranger ends up being explicit about certain plot points that Waters' novel leaves more ambiguous, it arguably serves the overarching storyline and its concerns about the true nature of evil, rationalism vs. spirituality, and the destructiveness of the desire to climb in social stature. Abrahamson and Coxon are further successful in adapting the psychological aspects of The Little Stranger 's source material for the medium of cinema, smartly implementing storytelling tools like voiceover narration and flashbacks in ways that never come across as being lazy and, at the same time, successfully raise questions about how reliable (or not) a narrator Faraday really is.

Charlotte Rampling in The Little Stranger

Abrahmson and his cinematographer Ole Bratt Birkeland ( Ghost Stories ) firmly set the tone for The Little Stranger in the way they photograph Simon Elliott's ( The Book Thief ) handsome production design for Hundreds Hall and its surroundings. The film smartly draws from a moody color palette of grays and blacks (and variations thereon) during its present-day scenes, as a vivid contrast to Faraday's more brightly lit recollections of the decaying manor. This painterly approach results in a beautifully eery-looking movie that retains a richly haunting sense of atmosphere throughout its runtime, with a mournful yet lovely score by Stephen Rennicks (Abrahmson's Frank and Room collaborator) to aid its cause. While The Little Stranger is by no means a thrill ride (despite what its marketing might have you believe), its deliberate slow pace and quiet temperament make the louder and more violent sequences all the more unsettling and disturbing, without having to resort to cheaper tactics (namely, easy jump scares).

Gleeson as Dr. Faraday is himself the perfect representation of the film's attractive, yet troubling and unsettling design, with his sharply gaunt appearance and uncomfortably soft-spoken manner. The actor does a great job of masking his character's true intentions, leaving it to the audience to wonder if he is to be trusted... or if Faraday is hiding some malicious and sinister intent behind his (seemingly) polite and gentle demeanor. Indeed, as with his previous movies, Abrahamson excels at bringing out strong performances all around from his actors in The Little Stranger . Wilson and Rampling are equally well-cast in their respective roles as two people that are slaves to their stature and family name, albeit in rather different ways. Meanwhile, Poulter delivers a solid performance here as a WWII veteran damaged in more than one way, without seeming out of place next to the rest of the cast here (and thus, further demonstrating his dramatic range after his villainous turn in last year's true story drama, Detroit ).

Domhnall Gleeson and Ruth Wilson in The Little Stranger

Because The Little Stranger is more psychological drama than thriller (as indicated earlier), some may find the film to be merely slow, rather than suffocating and menacing. Moreover, some fans of Waters' original book might be a bit disappointed by how the film is clear-cut about certain things that its source novel leaves more up in the air. That's not to say the film is ham-fisted in its storytelling - far from it. It simply has an interpretation of the source material's implications and true meaning that may differ from what others took away from it. Nevertheless, it's a clever and thoughtful interpretation that may even inspire some to re-read Waters' novel from a different perspective.

Ultimately, The Little Stranger is yet another subtly powerful offering from Abrahamson that combines several elements - Gothic romance, supernatural horror, psychological drama - in such a way that it avoids fittingly squarely into any single genre box (though this also makes the film all the more difficult to market - hence its somewhat misleading trailer and posters). The film may not be the straightforward horror-thriller that some are looking for, but it's certainly worth checking out if you're in the mood for a quality period drama that's heavy on menacing atmosphere and slow-burn creepiness. What better way to wrap up August and the end of the summer movie season than a bone-chilling trip back in time to the English countryside?

The Little Stranger is now playing in U.S. theaters. It is 111 minutes long and is rated R for some disturbing bloody images.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section!

The Little Stranger

The Little Stranger is a gothic horror drama directed by Lenny Abrahamson. Set in post-World War II England, the film stars Domhnall Gleeson as Dr. Faraday, who is called to treat a patient at Hundreds Hall, a decaying mansion owned by the Ayres family. Ruth Wilson, Will Poulter, and Charlotte Rampling co-star as members of the troubled family.

Movie Reviews
4 star movies

The Little Stranger Is a Different Kind of Haunted-House Movie

Lenny Abrahamson’s adaptation of Sarah Waters’s novel stars Domhnall Gleeson as a doctor who gets wrapped up with a decaying aristocratic family in postwar Britain.

Domhnall Gleeson in ' The Little Stranger'

What better setting for a ghost story than a dilapidated mansion? Peeling paint, groaning pipes, creaky stairs, and abandoned rooms—you barely need a phantom to complete the picture. Recent onscreen hauntings have included Guillermo del Toro’s excellent Crimson Peak in 2015, set in a manse where red mud dripped from the walls, or Ari Aster’s Hereditary , with its creepy dollhouses and even creepier mid-century modern home. Hundreds Hall, the main venue of The Little Stranger , has all the makings of a classic haunted house. It’s a crumbling edifice decades removed from its former glory, filled with the dysfunctional remnants of an aristocratic family.

But Lenny Abrahamson’s new film, an adaptation of Sarah Waters’s 2009 novel, isn’t quite as rote a tale as that setting might make it seem. It’s a delicate movie that uses the standard dressing of a ghost story to dig into Britain’s postwar class upheaval. Here, the emphasis isn’t on jump scares, but on genuine, pervasive dread. There’s a suggestion of the paranormal, though that dread could simply be the wheels of time turning against the upper-class Ayres family: They’re haunted equally by the loss of a daughter to illness years ago and by the loss of their place in the world as the country changes around them.

Into this decaying palace walks Doctor Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson), initially called to inspect the home’s maid (its only remaining servant), who has fallen ill. He soon realizes the maid (Liv Hill) is not sick, but merely lonely, overwhelmed by her life in an empty house that was once fully staffed. So he goes upstairs to get a fuller diagnosis of what’s wrong at Hundreds Hall, and gets sucked into its deep churn of family drama, and possibly supernatural possession.

The home’s nominal master, Roderick (Will Poulter), is covered in burn scars from his service in the war and is reckoning with serious PTSD. His mother, Angela (Charlotte Rampling), has never really forgotten the death of her first daughter, Susan, many years prior. Her other daughter, Caroline (Ruth Wilson), is the only member of the family who seems remotely well adjusted, but she’s roundly ignored by the rest of the Ayreses as a result. Faraday, who is buttoned-up even by the standards of an English costume drama, quickly develops a crush on her, along with an increased obsession with Hundreds Hall itself.

Abrahamson’s film (scripted by the playwright Lucinda Coxon) is, much like his last effort, Room , very focused on the space its characters must navigate through. Hundreds Hall is a fascinating location, with spectacular murals rendered on faded wallpaper and entire floors standing empty, a reminder of the home’s former primacy in its rural Warwickshire location. Roderick is struggling to sell some of the family’s land just to keep finances afloat, and due to his limp he’s started sleeping in the sumptuous drawing room, leaving the Ayreses literally unable to entertain guests.

Faraday is firmly middle-class, a country doctor who served in the war; now, he’s part of Britain’s fledgling National Health Service, which was introduced by Clement Attlee’s Labour government, elected with a sweeping majority in 1945. As the father of the NHS, Attlee ushered in a real sense of societal change in the country. Faraday, as a young boy, idolized the inhabitants of Hundreds Hall as remote gods, and the film frequently cuts back to his memories of attending a garden party there and wondering at the life he could not lead.

The doctor’s nascent relationship with Caroline thus gets rapidly tied up in his buried desire to climb the social ladder, even as it’s clear that her way of life is going extinct. So even their romance, the film’s one spot of optimism, is suffused with Faraday’s unspoken anxieties. Alongside that is the creeping notion that the house is occupied with some sort of poltergeist, perhaps Susan’s lingering spirit. Doors rattle, servant’s bells are rung in unoccupied rooms, and mysterious writing is found on walls and furniture, suggesting—if nothing else—a house in open rebellion against its occupants.

Abrahamson uses sound magnificently to rack up the tension as things go from uneasy to actually frightening. One room’s acoustics are so perfect that every line is magnified to hit one’s ear like a bullet; other times, strange whispers and barely audible noises click around the room, often going unexplained. The film builds to a conclusion that’s undoubtedly surprising, but also far from the kind of hackneyed twist I feared. The performers, particularly Gleeson, keep The Little Stranger from feeling easy to figure out. Every character is struggling to play their part in Britain’s ordered society, and it’s rare that they disobey those strictures. But the entire film has the sense of something being profoundly, and mercifully, upended; the result is engrossing, satisfying, and more than a little heartbreaking.

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'The Little Stranger' Review: An Elegant, Elegiac Gothic Thriller
The Little Stranger film review: an icy and sharp Gothic chiller
The Little Stranger review: A quietly brilliant tale of grief and
Movie review: 'The Little Stranger' a horror stumble
The Little Stranger Movie Review
THE LITTLE STRANGER (2018) Reviews and overview

COMMENTS

The Little Stranger movie review (2018)
The film's genuine frights take their time to arrive, but a consistently ominous mood, present in dusty, mahogany-heavy rooms and shadowy hallways, proves worthier than the petty jump scares "The Little Stranger" sidesteps for the most part. This might initially frustrate viewers who may have gravitated towards Hundreds Hall for chills ...
The Little Stranger (2018)
THE LITTLE STRANGER is an atmospheric, haunting, realistic ghost story that has surprising relevance to the issues of modern day life despite being a period film.
The Guardian
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Review: In 'The Little Stranger,' a Haunted House and a Fading Way of
Domhnall Gleeson stars as a doctor who gets mixed up with an aristocratic family in Britain in this adaptation of Sarah Waters's Gothic novel.
The Little Stranger (2018)
The Little Stranger: Directed by Lenny Abrahamson. With Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter, Ruth Wilson, Liv Hill. After a doctor is called to visit a crumbling manor, strange things begin to occur.
'The Little Stranger' Review: An Elegant, Elegiac Gothic Thriller
Film Review: 'The Little Stranger' There's a ghost in the walls of Lenny Abrahamson's elegiac period mystery, but it's Ruth Wilson's performance that does the real haunting.
The Little Stranger review: A quietly brilliant tale of grief and
The Little Stranger is a quietly brilliant tale of pain, grief, and possibly ghosts The slow-burn tale filters class concerns through pristine fear.
The Little Stranger review: One of the most original British horror
Cert 12A, 111 mins The Little Stranger is one of the most original British horror films of recent times - although whether it can really be classified as horror is a moot point.
The Little Stranger (film)
The Little Stranger is a 2018 gothic drama film directed by Lenny Abrahamson and written by Lucinda Coxon, based on the 2009 novel of the same name by Sarah Waters.
The Little Stranger Review: The Horror of Social Climbing
Read Matt Goldberg's The Little Stranger review; Lenny Abrahamson's movie stars Domhnall Gleeson, Ruth Wilson, Will Poulter, and Charlotte Rampling.
Peeling Back the True Horror of The Little Stranger
In trailers, this adaptation of Sarah Waters' novel seems a spooky haunted house tale set in the austere decadence of early Windsor-era England. For most of its runtime, the film appears a gothic romance in which the mild-mannered Doctor Faraday ( Domhnall Gleeson) must combat the unknown evil inhabiting the illustrious Hundreds Hall so he ...
The Little Stranger Review
The cast are superb, but with characters this stiff there are only glimpses of emotion. This is a film that's as much about class, then, as about ghosts, and it's at its best when dealing with ...
The Little Stranger Movie Ending, Explained by Director Lenny
The eerie and confusing ending of 'The Little Stranger' speaks to what director Lenny Abrahamson means by "haunted house."
The Little Stranger Movie Review
Well-made gothic noir has scares, bloody scenes. Read Common Sense Media's The Little Stranger review, age rating, and parents guide.
The Little Stranger (2018)
80. Vox Alissa Wilkinson. It's a slow-burn horror film, one that has all the sudden scares and moments of pristine fear present in any good movie of its ilk. But in the hands of Lenny Abrahamson (Room), The Little Stranger is elevated by measured pacing that also makes the larger house-based metaphor clear — and the result is both elegiac ...
The Little Stranger Review
The Little Stranger plays with a lot of respect for the viewer and zero scenes with long, drawn-out explanations, but an attentive audience will get a great deal from the experience. Both Lenny ...
The Little Stranger ending explained: Is there really a ghost in the
The film The Little Stranger has hit UK cinemas and is based on the best-selling book by author Sarah Waters.
The Little Stranger Review
In many ways, an atmospheric period piece like The Little Stranger is the perfect antidote to the splashy summer movie season, a slow burn drama where there is barely any actual movement among the ...
'The Little Stranger' Review: A Haunting Meditation on Time
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.
The Little Stranger Movie Review
The Little Stranger is a gripping adaptation that's more Gothic drama than horror-thriller, but may haunt you long after its credits are done rolling. Much like Lenny Abrahamson's last two directorial efforts ( Frank and the Oscar-winning Room ), The Little Stranger is a film that defies easy labels and genre convention, in the very best ways. Based on the 2009 novel by Sarah Waters, this ...
The Little Stranger Is a Different Kind of Haunted-House Movie
Lenny Abrahamson's adaptation of Sarah Waters's novel stars Domhnall Gleeson as a doctor who gets wrapped up with a decaying aristocratic family in postwar Britain.
'The Little Stranger' Is A Beautiful Gothic Drama That Is Uninterested
Like Lenny Abrahamson 's previous two movies, " Room " and " Frank ," " The Little Stranger " is a study in restraint. A bare bones description of the film - a doctor discovers strange occurrences at an English estate in the 1940s - makes it sound like high-brow horror, but the filmmaker has far more on his mind than simple scares. Adapted from Sarah Waters ' novel, "The ...
The Little Stranger
The Little Stranger - Metacritic. Summary Dr. Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson), the son of a housemaid, 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.

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