Harry Potter’s big screen debut broke records on its release and introduced a whole new legion of fans to the adventures of the Boy Who Lived (Greg D. Smith included), and so the pressure was on for director Chris Columbus and his young stars to deliver on this sequel. Could lightning strike twice?

Almost missing the start of school is just the start of Harry’s problems. Hearing a murderous voice in the walls as a series of attacks leave various members of the school petrified and mysterious messages appear in blood on the walls, Harry feels increasingly isolated. Can he and his friends find the mysterious Chamber of Secrets and stop the Heir of Slytherin before anyone is killed?

There’s a train of thought (one of which I was a part) that suggests the Harry Potter movies only took a dark turn with Alphonso Cuaron’s Prisoner of Azkaban. On a re-watch of this second offering from Christopher Columbus, I realised just how wrong this was. From early on this movie sets a much darker tone than its predecessor, but this is often lost beneath memories of Dobby’s mischief and the clownish antics of Kenneth Branagh’s Gilderoy Lockhart. Get into the film proper, however, and what you have is a tale that speaks to abuse, murder, manipulation and even themes of consent – this isn’t just another kids movie.

 

 

 

If you’re a fan of the books, of course, you realise as I did in hindsight that whereas Chamber of Secrets feels oddly subdued and static in many ways on a first go around, it’s actually a key foundational piece of the whole saga, with links to the very last novel. Things are set in motion here that take a while to become fully clear, and that means on a first viewing this one can feel a little repetitive in terms of the overall narrative – the big bad has once again found a way to come back from the dead and attempt to threaten the life of our hero as well as bring a fresh wave of his own brand of terror to the magical world. To face him down will require the solving of some mysteries, being ignored by teachers, visiting with Hagrid and facing scary monsters, and ultimately one of the trio will be injured before the final confrontation leaving Harry to go it alone for the final showdown. There’s even a bad Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher and an attempt on our hero’s life at a Quidditch match. Parallels with the first movie are easy enough to draw, but also unhelpful. Where the first movie gradually tips our hero into things with a growing sense of excitement and adventure, what we get here is something altogether different.

For starters, Harry is constantly being kept off balance in this film. From the opening where it seems that the one place he thinks of as home is now the one place so many elements are conspiring to keep him away from, it’s clear that our hero isn’t going to have an easy ride. His literal incarceration behind bars by Uncle Vernon, the revelation by Dobby that he’s been intercepting all the letters from friends Harry has spent the summer assuming had forgotten him – everything that Harry thought had been solved last time out by the revelation of his magical heritage and the finding of friends and a life of meaning has apparently been snatched away from him. If Philosopher’s Stone was Harry’s first steps into a wider world, Chamber of Secrets is him learning that no matter what world he ends up living in, there are dark corners to it, and not just of the evil dark lord kind.

When he accidentally sends himself to Knockturn Alley, Harry comes face to face with the darker, seedier side of the magical world,  he’s faced with first, a shop full of shrunken heads and other creepy offerings, and then by a crowd of decidedly dodgy-looking witches and wizards who crowd in, trying to pull him somewhere – it’s only the timely intervention of Hagrid which saves him, and even at this early juncture it’s a nice reinforcement of the fact that in spite of his fame and fortune, it’s not just Voldemort and his fanatics to whom Harry could fall victim.

And when he arrives at school, things don’t get much better. He’s hearing a murderous voice in the walls (‘Even in the wizarding world, hearing voices isn’t a good sign’ says Hermione), he keeps finding himself at the scene of various catastrophes in the corridors involving fellow students, a ghost and the caretaker’s cat. He appears to a whole room full of people to try and set a snake on a fellow pupil even though he was actually trying to stop it from attacking. At every turn, no matter what he does, Harry is beset by bad fortune, and made to feel isolated from those around him. Even Ron and Hermione start to look at him a little strangely at points.

And even the ‘fun’ parts of the story have darker undertones. Moaning Myrtle is a figure of fun – a theatrically mopey ghost who causes people to avoid the second floor girls’ bathroom, Myrtle is teased by students and appears at first to be a simple element of comic relief. Yet as the story unfolds, it transpires that Myrtle is the victim of the Basilisk from the first time the Chamber of Secrets was opened. A pupil actually horribly murdered in the school (in fact, in the bathroom which she now haunts) is no small thing, and even when she says to Harry, as he goes to face the Basilisk himself, that if he dies he can share her bathroom, it’s a serious reminder of the stakes couched in humour, as evidenced by Harry’s solemn response.

Gilderoy Lockhart too, is a foppish idiot the movie invites the audience to laugh at from his very first appearance. Arrogant, narcissistic and completely self-obsessed, Lockhart’s frippery and bluster hide a darker side to his character. This is a man who uses his one talent (memory charms) to take credit for the achievements of many others, spinning out his legend and attaining celebrity status. The truth behind his charismatic smile, handsome looks and apparent bumbling is very sinister – how many lives have been sacrificed in his pursuit of glory? More important, why has Dumbledore – an excellent judge of character – invited such an idiot to teach his students Defence against the Dark Arts? It’s this last question that once again only really starts to get an answer as the series continues. Suffice it to say here that Dumbledore simultaneously ascribes little importance and all the importance in the world to Snape’s dream job, and he has his reasons.

Then there’s Hagrid. The first movie has him as a harmless old buffer with an unusual obsession with dangerous creatures he can’t see as anything other than cute. Here, we find the reason for Hagrid’s original expulsion from the school as a pupil – for it was he who was accused of having opened the Chamber of Secrets all those years ago, and his giant Acromantula Aragog who stood accused of the killing of Myrtle. Because of the way that this information is imparted to Harry (and therefore the audience) via a flashback sequence through Tom Riddle’s diary, it seems plausible – indeed, when the number of incidents becomes too much for the Ministry of Magic to continue to ignore, Hagrid is sent to Azkaban because it is presumed that he himself has been responsible once again. It’s at this point, as much as we feel sympathy for Hagrid, that he once again demonstrates his biggest character flaw – the assumption that all his creatures are good – by sending Ron and Harry into the forest to find and speak with Aragog himself.

Aragog may well be one of the most interesting characters in the film, for all that he appears only briefly and likely gives arachnophobic viewers as many issues as he does Ron. His perfectly enunciated English, spoken from a giant spider’s face, is oddly jarring. His softly-spoken manner terrifying. The candour he shows in speaking to Harry and Ron is all the scarier when he airily informs them that whereas his children won’t harm Hagrid on his command, he can’t deny them the fresh meat the two boys represent. This is an extremely adult take on a character – Aragog is not presented as ‘evil’ – he doesn’t take any apparent relish in the imminent demise of the two friends, he simply does not have the will to try and stop his progeny from eating them, seeing it as more of a matter of convenience than anything else. And were it not for the intervention of the wandering, apparently slightly sentient Ford Anglia, both our male leads would die right there and then.

Speaking of Ron, what’s really standout here is the pitch perfect balance achieved by both writing and acting for the character. It’s established in the first film that Ron is not the most magically gifted of wizards but has the heart of a lion in the courage stakes. Here, we have a Ron who is always ready to stand up for his friends – sometimes with disastrous results for himself, such as throwing up slugs uncontrollably after a spell backfires – and will follow them even into his worst nightmares. Ron is an arachnophobe – he is literally terrified of spiders, yet he follows Harry into the forest on the trail of lots of them. Yes, he freaks out in the clearing when they are surrounded, yes the tendency of young Grint’s voice to crack as he went through puberty lends an air of comedy to the viewer of his terror, but still, the point is that even when facing his actual nightmare, Ron will stand by his friend.

Our main villain, revealed in the third act, is a clever take on what could otherwise have been a boring trope. Riddle is Voldemort, we find out, but he’s not the Voldemort, or more specifically, he isn’t the same Voldemort Harry faced before. This is the proto-Voldemort, the teenaged memory of the Dark Wizard, preserved magically in the pages of a diary. Full of the bile and spite which filled him in those teenaged years, this version of Voldemort also has the pride and arrogance of youth which ultimately prove his downfall. His use of Ginny as a puppet to carry out his whims gives uncomfortable overtones – especially right now – we have a villain literally forcing a young girl to act against her will, and not caring about the consequence to either her or the people who get hurt as a result. The reason for that is the core of Voldemort’s beliefs – the ugly cancer which both allowed him to grow into the monster he became and which drove that growth and agenda. Riddle is a racist.

Other authors have written more authoritatively on the issue of race within Rowling’s creations. Rowling herself has a less than spotless record on the subject given the number of cultures she appropriated bits of to create her world (not forgetting the ones she ignored). That’s a different essay though – here I want to talk specifically about how this film addresses racism in a way that’s well-intentioned, if not exactly subtle.

It starts with the use of the pejorative ‘mudblood’ by Malfoy to Hermione. On its own, you might miss the significance, but then it gets explained a little later in a conversation with Hagrid. It’s a term referring to the ‘dirty blood’ of wizards and witches born to muggles – those of ‘impure blood’. It’s impossible to miss the analogy being made here – especially in the current political climate – and it’s actually a fairly sophisticated take for a movie primarily aimed at children. We aren’t talking about people getting bullied for looking different or dressing funny or not being in the right gang – we are talking about an arbitrary line in the sand drawn by bigots in order to pour disdain on those to whom they wish to feel superior. Even more impressive, the film is able to show the poisonous progression such logic takes – Draco is an unlikeable bully and a brat, but at this point he isn’t evil. But he slings around a term like ‘mudblood’ so thoughtlessly, and with a venom most likely learned from his father Lucius (played to icy perfection by Jason Isaacs), and that then leads us to Riddle, and his own obsession with the legacy of Salazar Slytherin whose conviction that magic should be the reserve only of the ‘pure’ led to the creation of the Chamber of Secrets in the first place. It’s also a foundational principle of Voldemort’s own crusade, as we find out later on in the series. Here, all we know is that this dangerously fanatical and cruel teenager is where Voldemort starts, and it’s chilling to see.

Perhaps most striking of all though, is just how different Harry and his nemesis are. Harry, born to wizard parents and of a wealth and station that could lend itself to the very sort of prejudices Riddle harbours, is instead repulsed by them. Partly, one can extrapolate it’s a result of Harry’s own suffering as a child – he knows what the receiving end of bullying feels like, and therefore has the empathy to avoid it. Partly though, it’s just who Harry is. Riddle, born to a muggle father, despises the idea of anything less than purity, and is willing to kill to preserve it. He even says that he changes his name to Voldemort so as to avoid carrying his ‘filthy muggle father’s name’. There’s a special kind of self-loathing evident in what Riddle (and by extension Voldemort) will go on to do. Harry, told his whole life that he is worse than nothing, believes in fundamental good and doing the right thing. Riddle, an excelling pupil at school and who has grown up knowing his magical legacy from the beginning, believes in nothing beyond his own power over others.

As a movie aimed at children then, it deals with some distinctly adult themes, and does so in a sophisticated way. It introduces both Harry and the audience to the idea that even in this different, magical world, there are still the same old problems. Duplicity, arrogance, greed, selfishness and prejudice are not simply wiped away by the introduction of magic and the possibilities it brings. There’s a very human shape to all our characters here, and the society in which they live, and the problems that introduces are far more intractable and difficult, ironically, than vanquishing a basilisk.

So spare a thought for this often overlooked entry in the franchise. It doesn’t just do a lot of the heavy lifting for plot points that will play out later down the line in Harry’s own saga – some of them in the very last movie – but it also fleshes out the world in which our hero lives. It’s plenty dark, and it puts all of its characters through some pretty intense trauma, while remembering to throw us the occasional laugh to lighten the mood. It may not be perfect (the saccharine line added by Hollywood from Harry to Hagrid at the end ‘There’s no Hogwarts without you Hagrid’ being a particularly egregious part) but it’s a much better entry than it gets credit for, and improves upon the first by deepening and widening its world in sometimes surprising and always challenging ways.