The big problem with The Little Stranger

Everyone loves a well-told ghost story. The Little Stranger, an adaptation of the novel by Sarah Waters, is a lowkey, Freudian take on the time-worn haunted house story. Yet it's also a perverse love letter to a decaying aristocracy which demonises ordinary people who don't know their place.

The characterisation of Domhnall Gleeson's repressed protagonist Dr Faraday, along with some telling contextual cues, sour what is otherwise an excellent film. Though The Little Stranger is bound to disappoint anyone looking for a traditional horror movie, its character-driven narrative and scaled-back scares are reminiscent of the best of A24 era horror.

Yet politically, the film feels far from progressive. The spectre at its heart is not the restless spirit of Sukey Ayres, the dead child suspected to be behind the strange goings on at Hundreds Hall, but middle class jealousy. Metaphorically at least, self-made men like Dr Faraday wipe out their aristocratic betters through the sheer desire of wanting to be like them. 

Let's talk you through the big problem with The Little Stranger. Be warned, there will be spoilers ahead!

Who is killing the Ayres family?

The Little Stranger kicks off with Dr Faraday being called to Hundreds Hall, the Ayres' decaying ancestral home, to attend to a sick servant.

The place is full of memories for him – his mother worked there as a servant during the Ayres' glory days, and he obsesses over a childhood memory of attending a summer fete in the grounds before sneaking inside and vandalising a mirror.

Nowadays, the Ayres are having to sell off their land to make way for neat rows of detached houses (the horror!).

Over the course of the film, Faraday grows close to the Ayres at around the same time they start being killed off one by one by a mysterious supernatural force. They think it's probably Mrs Ayres' dead daughter Sukey.

Ruth Wilson's gawkish Caroline Ayres is eventually the last woman standing, just in time for Faraday to make some very clumsy moves on her. She agrees to marry him, but goes back on their engagement when it becomes abundantly clear that Faraday wants Hundreds Hall and not her.

Pretty soon she's dead too. Her final word is an accusatory "You!" before an unseen assailant topples her over the banister for a fatal fall down the Hall's rather lush staircase.

Faraday was in the car outside the Hall the whole night – could he have offed his ex-fiancé? It's left ambiguous in the book, but the film clears things up a bit with a chilling final shot.

We see the spectral form of Faraday as a child alone in the abandoned Hundred Hall, a solitary tear crawling down his cheek.

So what the hell happened?

Well, it's a bit complicated. The question of who killed Caroline Ayres is very likely to cause arguments outside the cinema.

Thankfully, the director Lenny Abrahamson has cleared things up a little in an interview with Thrillist.

"There's a scene earlier on with the other doctor in the pub. Faraday and he are discussing whether or not, under significant pressure, the subconscious might somehow fracture from the conscious and become a force by itself," Abrahamson says.

The director pointed to a key scene where, as a child, Faraday vandalises the Ayres' mirror. By breaking off one of the wooden ornamental acorns, Faraday attempted to claim something of Hundreds Hall as his own.

Abrahamson suggests that this scene also serves as a metaphor for the fracturing of Faraday's aggressive subconscious desires from his conscious self.

"At the moment where the boy breaks the acorn, that's the moment at which his rage, desire, impotent longing, and knowledge that he'll never be accepted [fractured]," he says. "That's where that happens and that's where you feel the house has absorbed something. And that's what lives in it.

"And the image of the boy [in the final scene] is a kind of representation of that. We're not saying that it was the physical boy [that pushed Caroline]. We're saying that it was something of him."

So basically, Faraday's subconscious rage and jealousy has haunted the house ever since he broke off that acorn. He killed Caroline, her mother and probably her sister Sukey too. Faraday is a Dr Jeckyl who is "unaware of the Mr Hyde," as Abrahamson puts it.

Why is this problematic?

Essentially, Faraday's jealousy of the Ayres wealth, home and status is so powerful that it literally kills them.

The novel by Sarah Waters flipped the traditional literary narrative of the social climber, and played on how readers root for characters like Becky Sharp, Jay Gatsby and Charles Ryder who try and insinuate themselves into a world of aristocratic opulance.

We sympathise with these characters, and want them to break down the barriers into an exclusive and privileged world. Dr Faraday, on the other hand, is almost wholly bad. He's a selfish and covetous misogynist, and just as much of a snob as the Ayres.

Though we are encouraged to sympathise with him during the early scenes – particularly when he gets a frosty reception from Mrs Ayres (Charlotte Rampling) after she learns he's the son of her former servant – the movie manipulates our expectations and slowly reveals Faraday's true character.

Unfortunately, this is all very much playing into the right-wing theory of "the politics of envy" – the idea that the average person only criticises the rich and privileged because they want what they have. All the Ayres seem to be guilty of in the film is a penchant for scathing put-downs, while Faraday's jealousy wipes out their entire family.

The movie's conservative agenda

So maybe Faraday is just a bastard, and his murders aren't a metaphor for how the grasping middle classes toppled their social betters in the Post-War period?

This could be so, but the film drops a number of contextual cues which suggest a conservative agenda.

The film is set at a time when the birth of the welfare state and the NHS were treated with distrust and snobbery. Making ordinary people's lives a little better, and making the rich pay for it with increased taxation, was thought to threaten the moral character of the nation. Key intellectuals such as George Orwell and T. S. Eliot spoke out against this social change.

The Little Stranger continually romanticises the aristocracy's heyday, and treats progressive change with distrust. Faraday is horrified that the Ayres land will be used for a new housing estate. When asked if he feels that his career is threatened by the new NHS, he responds that he feels secure because "people like to look up to their doctors".

If we turn to the character of Sukey Ayres, Caroline mentions on several occasions how the whole family were jealous of her.

Perhaps here in minature is the film's vision of the British class system in the Post-War period: the push for social change motivated by something just as simple and petty as sibling rivalry.

In this way both the film and the novel closely resemble classic texts like Brideshead Revisited and The Great Gatsby. Gatsby doesn't win the aristorcatic Daisy; Charles Ryder comes within a hair's breadth of winning Brideshead Castle but ultimately fails.

The reader is allowed to glimpse at a rarefied aristocratic world which is just out of reach, but ultimately the gates are barred to them. The status quo is maintained.

Like Brideshead Revisited's portrait of an England degraded by the rise of the middle classes in the 1940s, The Little Stranger paints a picture of an aristocracy losing their grip on England and the self made men and women who are unfit to take their place.

Faraday doesn't win Hundreds Hall, but he differs from his literary precursors by being a despicable man who never really deserved it. 

The Little Stranger is in cinemas now.

Fancy a film which makes its anti-rich sentiments clear with obvious (and hilarious) metaphors? Check out 80s body horror Society. You can read why we think its politics could do with being a little more subtle here.

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