A maidservant there, Betty (Liv Hill) has stomach pains, but Faraday’s no-nonsense examination reveals them to be exaggerated or invented. 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. Gleeson’s performance suggests he’s affecting a severe professionalism to cover up his lowly origins. 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. 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.ĭomhnall 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. 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. Faraday, meanwhile, insists that they’re all talking a lot of nonsense.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. She welcomes its sometimes violent attentions. Ayres believes the specter to be her first daughter, the child she loved best, who died at age 8. Meanwhile, strange occurrences at Hundreds Hall-servant bells rung from unoccupied rooms, marks carved into the woodwork, footsteps and banging in the night-have both Roddy and Mrs.

This is partly their fault and partly his own, but like most people in such situations, he perceives only their careless slights, real and imagined, not his own stiff, off-putting manner-exactly the demeanor that will keep him from ever fully easing into their company. The novel, like the film, is full of exquisitely awkward scenes in which Faraday, a child of the working class, tries to mix with the Ayres’ upper-class friends and yet can never quite shake off the sense that he is their inferior. Only a generation or two earlier, landed gentry like the Ayres family might have socialized with their family doctor if he were likable enough, but would not have regarded him as their class equal. He courts Roddy’s sister, Caroline (Ruth Wilson), and begins to poke his nose into the business affairs of the estate.

As Faraday sees it, he’s trying to rescue both the Ayreses and Hundreds Hall.

The little stranger book