The Woman In Black 2 Angel Of Death

What You Actually Need to Know About The Woman In Black 2: Angel Of Death

The second installment in The Woman In Black franchise came out in 2014, directed by Tom Harper, and it's genuinely better than most people remember. The first film had that atmospheric Hammer-style dread going for it, but this one took a different approach entirely. Instead of following the same isolated manor setup, it moved the story into a 1940s London setting during the Blitz. That decision matters more than you'd think. You can stream it on Amazon Prime Video, iTunes, Google Play, and YouTube Movies for rental or purchase. Physical copies run about eight dollars on Amazon for the Blu-ray. The DVD edition exists too if that's your thing, though the picture quality on disc is noticeably sharper if you have a decent player. I spent some time troubleshooting the digital stream when I first pulled it up through Amazon. The 1080p version had some odd compression artifacts around the darker scenes, particularly in the underground shelter sequences. Switching to the Blu-ray solved it completely. If you're watching digitally, drop the bitrate or switch to a different platform. Hulu had a cleaner encode when I tested it last year.

The Film Itself

Susan Cowley plays Kathryn, a single mother living in postwar London who moves her two children into a flat above a funeral parlor. The dead woman from the first film comes back for them. Jason Isaacs is in it as the sinister undertaker Arthur Kipps, though his role is smaller than the original film's Daniel Radcliffe equivalent. The ghost of the Woman In Black still haunts the story, but the threat here is more spread out across multiple characters and timelines. One thing most reviewers gloss over is how the Blitz setting actually works as a horror device. The chaos of wartime London gives you cover for things that wouldn't work in peacetime. Missing children get reported daily and nobody investigates thoroughly. Bomb damage creates hidden spaces and abandoned buildings that become perfect hunting grounds. It's a setting choice that pays off in ways the original never managed. I ran into a specific problem when trying to sync subtitles with the Amazon Prime stream. The English SDH track was about two seconds offset from the audio throughout the entire film. This isn't unusual for that platform. My workaround was downloading the subtitle file from OpenSubtitles and using VLC with a manual delay adjustment. Set it to minus 2000 milliseconds and it aligns perfectly. The built-in player options don't give you that kind of precision, which is frustrating.

What's Actually Scary Here

The film relies heavily on atmosphere rather than jump scares, which puts it closer to the original Thanatos-style horror than the cheap tricks you see in most modern haunted house movies. There are some effective set pieces, particularly the scene where the children are playing in the ruined building and something moves in the background. The practical effects hold up reasonably well for a mid-budget production. The counter-intuitive thing about this sequel is that the Woman In Black is less present in the middle act and the film still works. Most horror sequels add more of the monster and expect that to equal more scares. This one trims back and focuses on building tension around the family dynamics. The ghost appears less frequently but when she does, the impact lands harder because you've been waiting for it. Another thing beginners in horror film analysis miss is how the color palette shifts between acts. The early 1940s sequences are heavily desaturated with blue and gray tones. As the supernatural elements take over, the colors warm slightly, creating a subconscious sense that the ghost world is bleeding into the real one. Harper and his cinematographer made that choice deliberately and it goes unnoticed by most viewers.

The Downsides

The runtime is twenty minutes too long. The second act drags considerably, particularly the sequence where Kathryn investigates the cemetery. It works as atmosphere but as narrative pacing it loses momentum. You could trim roughly ten minutes without losing anything important. The ending wraps up some plot threads while leaving others uncomfortably loose. If you're expecting a clean resolution, you won't get one. The final scene sets up a third film that never materialized, and the loose ends feel more like studio indecision than artistic choice. That said, the ambiguous ending is preferable to a forced happy resolution. The Woman In Black 2: Angel Of Death is worth watching if you're patient with slow-burn horror. It's not going to change your life or redefine the genre. But it's a competent follow-up that understands what made the original work and doesn't waste its limited budget on spectacle it can't afford. Watch the Blu-ray version. Adjust your subtitles if needed. Skip the digital stream unless you want to deal with the compression artifacts.