Film reviews: The Little Stranger, Mile 22, A Simple Favour and more

Irish director Lenny Abrahamson allows dread to build very slowly in this handsome period chiller.

In the opening scene, Abrahamson, nominated for an Oscar in 2016 for Room, seems to be setting up a typical upstairs, downstairs drama.

It is 1948 and we are gazing upon Hundreds Hall, a mansion in rural Warwickshire, through the awestruck eyes of Dr Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson).

It is the first time the good doctor has entered the gates since he was a child when his now-deceased mother worked there as a maid.

Faraday is making a house call after being informed that one of the servants has been taken ill.

“One of?” laughs Roderick Ayres (Will Poulter), the master of the house and a former RAF pilot who was badly burned in combat during the Second World War. “You’ll see.”

It turns out that the ailing Betty (Liv Hill) is now the only servant who is working in this once-thriving country estate.

Like all aristocrats, the Ayres family is suffering under the Labour government’s death taxes. But the doctor is still transfixed by the crumbling mansion.

A series of flashbacks hint at the root of this obsession.

As a child he stole into the house and on a strange impulse broke a plaster flower off one of the ornate cornices.

This crime was witnessed by the doctor’s mother and Susan (Tipper Seifert-Cleveland), Roderick’s long-dead sister. It was a crime that horrified his mother and she could never forgive him for it.

Before leaving the house, Faraday meets Mrs Ayres (Charlotte Rampling), Roderick’s haughty mother. He also discovers that Roderick’s hardworking sister Caroline (Ruth Wilson) is the one who is really running the mansion.

Slowly, an awkward romance begins to spark between the stuffy doctor and the free-spirited aristocrat.

As the class divisions begin to blur, strange incidents start to happen in the house. A girl is left horribly injured at a dinner party and strange symbols start appearing on the walls.

The doctor tries to find rational explanations. But as the strange occurrences pile up, Faraday’s stiff upper lip appears to quiver.

In the finale, Abrahamson resorts to the twists and turns of the typical haunted house movie. But it is that slow build-up that will stay with you.

Mile 22 *** (Cert 18, 94mins)

Producer-actor Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg have made three rousing action movies in the past five years, all of them based on true stories.

Mile 22 is a slight departure from Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon and Patriots Day for the Hollywood duo. It is entirely fictional and does not strive to put a patriotic spin on current events.

It’s also relatively mainstream and makes an entertaining but pretty blatant bid to launch a new Bourne-style espionage franchise.

Wahlberg’s Jimmy Silva is a motor-mouthed special ops agent with a genius IQ, a short temper and an unwavering belief that the ends justify the most violent means imaginable.

We open in a Russian safe house in America, surrounded by a crack team of off-the-book US special forces called Overwatch, led on the ground by Silva.

As the armed Americans storm the building, we seem to be watching badly lit, badly shot footage from the team’s body cameras.

This is also the perspective of the crew’s boss who goes by the codename of Mother, played by John Malkovich.

However, it transpires that the “intell” on the raid was wrong. The house was supposed to contain chemical weapons which the Russians planned to use to wipe out US cities but none were found. Silva is furious with his comrades.

Thankfully a double agent played by Indonesian martial arts ace Iko Uwais turns up at the US embassy in a fictional Asian city, claiming to have the Russian plans on an encoded disc drive.

He says he will only give up the password once he is granted asylum and safely on a plane.

But local cops appear to be in cahoots with the Russians so the 22-mile drive to the airport involves shootouts, car chases and some shockingly gruesome mano-a-mano showdowns.

For the most part, the shaky camera and rapid editing works fine but it feels out of place whenever Uwais steps up to the plate.

If you saw him in The Raid, you will know that his amazing fighting skills are best served by long takes and wide angles.

Still, there is enough here to justify the sequel-baiting ending.

A simple favour **** (Cert 15, 117mins)

Director Paul Feig is best known for female-led comedies Bridesmaids and Spy so he seems an odd choice for an adaptation of Darcey Bell’s airport novel.

But it turns out A Simple Favour is not too much of a departure.

Anna Kendrick is perfectly cast as Stephanie Smothers, a goody-two-shoes single mum who meets Blake Lively’s sultry femme fatale Emily as she strides up to the school gates.

Their sons have started playing together so Emily invites Stephanie back to her huge house for cocktails.

Stephanie is a nerdy perfectionist who stars in a cutesy video blog about cooking and craftwork.

Emily is a hard-drinking, high-powered fashion executive with a handsome novelist husband (Crazy Rich Asians’ Henry Golding) and a mysterious past.

Suddenly Stephanie and Emily are best friends. “She doesn’t know she’s working for free,” says Darren (Andrew Rannells) to his kids when he sees Stephanie picking up Emily’s son Nicky (Ian Ho) from school.

Is Stephanie being taken for ride? And is Emily’s life too good to be true? Those are just two of the questions posed when Emily suddenly goes missing after tasking Stephanie with babysitting Nicky.

Feig effortlessly weaves together the mystery and comedy before it all falls apart in the preposterous final act.

The house with a clock in its walls *** (Cert 12A, 105mins)

“You’ll see, things are quite different here,” Jonathan Barnavelt (Jack Black) tells his recently orphaned nephew in this middling family adventure.

It is 1955 and 10-year-old Lewis (Owen Vaccaro) has just come to live in his uncle’s gothic mansion on the outskirts of a sleepy Michigan town.

Soon the boy will discover that his new guardian is a warlock and his new home is full of magical artefacts, including an excitable armchair that whines like a puppy and a slapstick topiary griffon in desperate need of house training.

He also meets Jonathan’s next-door neighbour and best friend Zimmerman, an elegant and very kindly witch played by Cate Blanchett.

But if you have seen any young adult fantasy film over the past decade, you may decide there’s nothing different about this one.

Horror director Eli Roth serves up another yarn about an awkward misfit kid who finds his voice when he trains to be magician.

After a crash course, Lewis can not only magic his way out of tight spots with the school bullies but also battle an undead evil wizard to save the universe in an against-the-clock finale.

Isaac Izard (Kyle MacLachlan) is Jonathan’s former warlocking partner who turned to the dark side.

This Voldemort-lite used to own the house and before he died, he hid a doomsday device in the form of a clock somewhere in the walls.

Jonathan and his two magical friends must unearth its secrets before it sounds its final bong during the next lunar eclipse.

Roth serves up some low-level scares from a flock of flying books, a pack of angry Halloween pumpkins and an attack from antique wind-up toys. The film is nicely shot and Black and Blanchett have some amusing lines. But old-fashioned movie magic is in very short supply.