Blackwood

This twisty, turny haunted house story blends the spectral and the psychological with some success. Although set in contemporary England, it's reminiscent of other home-grown horrors such as The Awakening and The Woman In Black. Ed Stoppard stars as a mentally fragile college professor who relocates with wife Sophia Myles and their son to the isolated country house of the title. Soon, traditionally spooky stuff starts happening: ghostly knocks, the chiming of an unwound clock, half-glimpsed figures and so on. But are they real, or merely the products of Stoppard's increasingly unsettled mind? Fellow professor Greg Wise delves into the history of the house in a bid to find out, with Russell Tovey's ex-military man seeming to hold vital clues as to what happened there. Director Adam Wimpenny (graduating from TV light entertainment) never quite digs the film out of the hole that some early complexity drops it into. But it's nicely done, with decent performances, a suitably creepy atmosphere and genuinely scary moments.