You might think that after getting an Academy Award nomination for directing Room, Lenny Abrahamson would be making more movies like that high-profile 2015 drama, which starred Oscar winner Brie Larson as a woman held captive by a psychopathic rapist. But the filmmaker, a 52-year-old Dubliner know for such small, difficult films as Frank – starring Michael Fassbender as a musician who wears a giant papier-mache head throughout the movie – has gone smaller, not bigger.
His latest movie is The Little Stranger, a hard-to-pigeonhole period drama set in post-World War II England, starring Domhnall Gleeson as a doctor who becomes caught up in the creepy occurrences in Hundreds Hall, a decrepit mansion belonging to an aristocratic family on the decline. Based on Sarah Waters’s 2009 novel, the story centers on the budding romance between Gleeson’s Dr. Faraday, an ambitious commoner, and the family’s upper-crusty yet approachable daughter, Caroline (Ruth Wilson). But is it a ghost story, as the film’s trailer would have you believe? Or an allegory of class resentment and paranoia, as Waters herself has said she set out to write?
We asked Abrahamson, who phoned in from New York during the film’s press tour.
What is “The Little Stranger”? Ghost story or big fat metaphor?
It’s a ghost story to the extent that there’s a ghost implied in it. And it does certainly nod toward some of the classic ghost-story tropes: the big, crumbling house, strange goings-on, people beginning to get worried about it, and other people assuring them that there’s a rational explanation, etc. But it borrows from a much older tradition of literary ghost stories, which use the form to talk about Freudian ideas. This is what struck me so about Sarah’s book. It’s also about class, and what happens to a society when groups of people are divided, and there is an implicit hierarchy of value.
Watching the film, I couldn’t help thinking of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” How much borrowing is there from that story, or its various film adaptations?
I think The Turn of the Screw, both the story and the famous 1961 film adaptation The Innocents, is probably the finest example of the use to which a ghost story can be put. I didn’t try to make specific links to that, but they are there.
Are you a fan of genre films?
I can enjoy genre films as a viewer, but I’ve never been drawn to make one. That’s the thing about Sarah’s novel I was most excited about. In the novel, there’s quite a long time where nothing untoward happens. I was quite surprised when the story took the turn it did. That journey she puts you on – where you don’t really know what the tram lines are, or there aren’t tram lines, in the way of a conventional ghost story – was very exciting.
What’s your answer to people who won’t watch “Room” because they think it’s a horror movie, which you have to admit it kind of sounds like?
With Room, we created an entire marketing campaign trying to address exactly that. That’s a hard one, because the horror pitch is so immediate. With cinema, much more so than literature, people have gotten used to marketing categories. It becomes a kind of shopping exercise: What do I feel like today? A thriller? A meaty drama? A romance? The Little Stranger is all of the above.
Faraday, the film’s ostensible hero, is a bit of a stuffed shirt, and Caroline, a representative of the snooty aristocracy, is quite captivating. Who is the hero and who is the villain here?
The hope is that by the end of the film, some of those categories will have dissolved a little bit. I’m always interested in stories where you encounter someone you think you understand but that you find harder to pin down at the end. What Faraday represents at the beginning is the rational guide that you get in stories about supernatural things: the (vampire hunter) Van Helsing guy. By the end, it’s very difficult to keep people contained in the boxes you’ve put them in at the beginning of the story.
Both “Room” and “The Little Stranger” use architecture in intriguing ways: as an existential presence, to use your phrase, as metaphor and to enhance a mood of claustrophobia. Where does that interest come from?
I really like having a boundary. Like in Room, the physical setting helps you limit the massive set of choices that exist. But I’ve always been interested in the emotional effect of spaces. As a kid, there were always various houses we’d pass on the route to school that really affected me – I don’t know why – certain doors or windows or yards that would have some electrical charge. Later, when I started to write, I realized that the way I was constructing events was more cinematic than literary. How time passes in a room. How life ebbs and flows in a space. Hundreds Hall, though much bigger, is actually more claustrophobic than Room.