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The Little Stranger director
Lenny Abrahamson
By Iain Blair
Lenny Abrahamson, the Irish director who helmed the cult indies Frank, What Richard Did, Adam & Paul and Garage, burst onto the international scene in 2015 with the harrowing drama Room. The claustrophobic tale — of a woman and her young son kept prisoner in a 10×10-foot garden shed — earned four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won the Best Actress Oscar and BAFTA for lead Brie Larson.
Now Abrahamson is back with a new film, Focus Features’ The Little Stranger, which swaps the tight confines of Room for the sprawling, light and airy expanses of a huge English country home.
But don’t be fooled by appearances. Abrahamson begins to twist the screws from the very start of the film, which is part ghost story, part murder mystery. The story follows Dr. Faraday (Domnhall Gleeson), the son of a housemaid, who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country doctor. During the long hot summer of 1948, he is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall, where his mother once worked. The Hall has been home to the Ayres family for more than two centuries, but it is now in decline. Its inhabitants — mother, son and daughter — are haunted by something more ominous than dying. When he takes on his new patient, Faraday has no idea how closely, and how disturbingly, the family’s story is about to become entwined with his own. It also stars Ruth Wilson (Showtime’s The Affair).
I recently spoke with Abrahamson about making the film.
Last time we talked, you had been offered a lot of high-profile projects after the huge success of Room. But instead you made this smaller film, which you had been developing. What do you look for in a project, and what was the appeal of this new film?
I did this for the same reason I did all my other films — I felt compelled to do it, and I connected to it. I’d been thinking about it for the past 10 years. I’m not really strategic about my career. I did consider other projects, but this just felt ready to go, and I was worried that if I didn’t do it just then, I’d never get to do it. So the timing was right.
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