Forty years after the events in which vengeful, child-hating revenant Jennet put the chills up Daniel Radcliffe, she’s still haunting Eel Marsh House. It’s now the second world war, and what better place to shelter a troop of evacuee children than an abandoned, cobweb-decked mansion stocked to the rafters with mouldering, macabre Victorian dolls? The sequel to the 2012 adaptation of Susan Hill’s old-school chiller essentially works the same scares again, mechanically and noisily. But in some ways this is a more elegant film than the first, with cinematographer George Steel lashing on the stygian shadows, and the 40s background played very effectively. Helen McCrory contributes a classy touch of blitz-era brittleness, Phoebe Fox holds the centre firmly as the plucky heroine, and Jeremy Irvine is a dashing pilot with… issues, don’t you know. A respectably effective, decorously English addition to the current ghost story wave – Frightfully Insidious, as it were.
