31 Nights Review: THE WITCH IN THE WINDOW

Simon picks up his young son Finn. Beverly, Simon's ex, is fraught because Finn broke into her computer and saw bad stuff. So, he's on zero screen time, including the phone, and in disgrace. Simon welcomes the chance to bond and takes the boy out to the house in Vermont that he's flipping. Bit of rustic air and some old fashioned slog will do the lad a world. Finn is sullen. He's on the 13 side of twelve.

Father and son work a slowly thawing truce while getting into the house repair but hear odd noises. The electrician arrives in the first jump scare and lets slip the story of the family that lived there and the woman, thought a witch, who by legend did the husband and son in and now haunts the place in anger. She can be seen in the upper floor window on a bad day. Not twenty minutes in and there's your title.

A later chat between Simon and Finn features a blurred shape of a woman in a mirror in the background. When you see it you shiver as they don't and it just stays there. A few more appearances and this thing is really picking up and then, at the point of crisis between the pair the ante's upped to maximum when she, Lydia, the witch, appears in the upper floor chair by the window. Beyond this point spoilers so that's that for plot.

I'd put this aside because of the phrase Hallmark film that I read in an IMDB user review. I know, I know but it stuck. Well, I can see what prompted that but it's a criminally inadequate description of this tale of communication and the gravity of acceptance. Simon's work on the house has a motivation I'll leave you to discover but it has nothing to do with sales. At first you might think of how futile his plan is but increasingly you have to understand that it only works when he thinks it, not when you do. His commitment to the house has profound consequences.

So where's all the horror? Well, the build up to Lydia's activation (let's call it) is so deftly done that the moment it bursts into ignition I cursed the movie for its jump scare as I felt a full body shiver and admitted how good it was. See, I hate most jump scare movies as the jolts are unearned; they are the difference Hitchcock drew between suspense and surprise and how he preferred the former. Apart from the first two in this film (both are mild and fun) all of the jumps are hard earned. The worst feature white knuckle suspense. I cried out at one of them. They are earned not just because the suspense is so well built but built upon character and the weave of essential information. While she is a distant apparition in a window or a mirror she will send shivers but when she breaks from this her power and malevolence render her terrifying.

So, here we have a horror movie that earns its shocks through expert atmospherics and a sombre determination to stick to the growing sadness of its central story. See also, The Innocents, The Haunting and Dark Water. Hallmark film? Hallmark IMDB review, more like. This one works and works hard, even delivering a soft and puzzling chill at the end just for value's sake. That's not a sequel setup, it's class.

On Shudder.