Voldemort vanquished, the boy who survived now gets a chance to be something other than Harry Potter. Daniel Radcliffe sheds his magical cloak to don a lawyer’s garb in his first major post-Potter role in The Woman in Black. Based on Susan Hill’s novel of the same name, the film is written by Jane Goldman and produced by Hammer Film Productions. James Watkins helms the horror-thriller, which also stars Ciarán Hinds, Janet McTeer, Sophie Stuckey and Liz White.

What’s Harry, oops, Radcliffe, now 22, up to? He plays Arthur Kipps, a widowed lawyer whose grief has cast a pall on his career. Kipps has to leave his son behind and travel to a remote village to sort out the affairs of a recently deceased woman, known to have been an eccentric. As he works alone in the Eel Marsh House, an isolated mansion, Kipps begins to realise that everyone in the small town is keeping a secret. His unease grows when he glimpses a mysterious woman dressed in black, and then he discovers that the Eel Marsh House is haunted. One night, alone in the house, he hears the screams of a drowning child; then, he sees decaying children wandering the marshes. He soon learns that whenever the Woman in Black is sighted, a child dies.

When the people try to keep him from uncovering the tragedy in their past, Kipps attempts to solve the mystery on his own. Why have children been disappearing mysteriously? Why have the people clammed up? Will Kipps be able to discover the identity of the Woman in Black? And will he win the race against time as he tries to stop her from realising her true intent? For this is a woman who is determined to find someone she lost and exact vengeance... And no one is safe, not the children of the town, and especially not Kipps’ son! Will Kipps be able to break the cycle of terror?

Radcliffe, who reportedly saw a psychologist to better understand Kipps’ character when he signed up for the film, is treading on familiar ground with this film. The haunted house, the scorned woman, and the vengeance theme — they’ve all been done before in umpteen films. But his stint on Broadway in Equus showed that he’s as comfortable doing the dark act as he is playing the brave heart of Hogwarts. As far as the film goes, it puts the usual horror film weapons — creepy Victorian toys and dolls, marshy outdoors, a spooky house, dark shots and sudden sounds — to good use.

Clarifying that The Woman in Black is not an out-and-out horror story, Radcliffe has said that it deals with “loss and family, and the main theme is about how different people deal with death”. “My character is somebody that — after the death of his wife at a young age — has disconnected from all relationships, be it his son or his work,” Radcliffe said in a recent interview. The Woman in Black, on the other hand, after the death of her son, becomes “vengeful and vindictive.

The Woman in Black, which weds a simple supernatural theme with psychological drama, may well be Radcliffe’s coming of age. That is, if true-blue Potter-maniacs can stop tuning into Harry when Kipps speaks on screen!