Faced with adapting the darkest novel in the series to date, David Yates (returning after several other directors were considered or had thrown their hats in the ring) went for a continuation of the style he had adopted for Order of the Phoenix, both visually and narratively. Though shorter than its predecessor, the book of Half-Blood Prince was much heavier in tone and content – so, asks Greg D. Smith, could Yates balance this darkness with the need to keep this a film for all the family?

 

With order restored at Hogwarts, Harry might expect an easier time of things, but Dumbledore has several more tasks for the Boy Who Lived, and the outcome of the war against Voldemort may rest on Harry’s success or failure. Meanwhile, his arch nemesis Draco is on a mission of his own, with no less deadly stakes.

Half-Blood Prince has – to me – always stuck out as the darkest book in the whole Potter series. There’s very little joy at the end, no sense of hope. Having established Dumbledore as the great saviour – the wise old figure who always has a plan two steps ahead of Voldemort and is the only wizard feared by the Dark Lord – Rowling has him die at the end of the book and leaves the students and teachers at Hogwarts (to say nothing of the reader) bereft, wondering what can possibly be done to save the day now.

And it’s not just the ending but the way that the book gets there – unbreakable vows, a young boy committed to a course that means murder, the discovery of the secret behind Horcruxes and just how far Voldemort was willing to go to achieve his immortality. Half-Blood Prince is an assault on the reader, lightened only by the bickering of Ron and Hermione and the diversion of the former’s first girlfriend and all the snogging that entails.

When I first saw the film at the cinema, I came away with the impression that Yates had overcooked it, leaning too heavily into the romcom elements to try to offset the darker aspects and therefore missing the whole point of the book. So disappointed was I, that this re-watch represents the first time since the cinema that I’d sat down to try to watch the film, and what I discovered was just how very wrong I had been all those years ago.

In format, in certain ways it echoes the previous film, cutting out the Dursleys entirely and preferring to concentrate on achieving the ‘feel’ of certain narrative elements without slavishly reproducing every scene from the book. It does shift emphasis and execution on certain elements, most notably the Hermione/Ron ongoing saga which is subtly but significantly shifted by certain small additions. In scope, it’s both more and less ambitious than the previous outing, having fewer narrative threads to cover, but committing to the darkness in some ion a way that’s refreshingly surprising for a family movie.

Skipping the book’s scene of a meeting between the Minister for Magic and the Muggle Prime Minister, the movie opens with a short, silent flashback to the aftermath of the end of Phoenix, before going straight to a scene of Death Eaters causing chaos and destruction in London (a scene only alluded to in the book) before taking us to Harry, sitting in a train station café reading his Daily Prophet (which does the job of filling us in on other notable events such as the imprisonment of Lucius Malfoy and the vindication of Harry in the wizarding world) and flirting with the young waitress there before real life intrudes once again in the form of Dumbledore, there to ask him a favour.

That favour involves the ex-professor Slughorn, though Harry has no idea why – as he says to Dumbledore, after all these years he just tends to go with it. Jim Broadbent is perhaps the absolute perfect choice for a character like Slughorn – ambitious, a little devious but not malicious. There are hidden depths to the character beneath the affable, slightly bumbling exterior, and it takes someone of Broadbent’s particular range and delicacy to pull these out. From this opening meeting to his last, tearful scene with Harry, Slughorn is never once a dull presence on the screen, and is always slightly impossible to fully pin down. Even as he confesses, there’s a sliver of doubt for the viewer as to whether he genuinely believes the qualifications to that confession (that he could never have known what Riddle would become) or whether he’s lying to himself and to Harry.

Significantly, it feels like the movie also addresses Malfoy and his own quest a little more directly than the novel, making the character and his journey in this narrative almost a mirror of Harry’s own, providing a ‘dark mirror’ adversary for Harry which he has lacked before in the series.

Malfoy, recruited by Voldemort and marked as a Death Eater, is on a mission to assassinate Dumbledore, much to the distress of his mother. Her enlistment of Snape to swear an unbreakable vow to protect her son and carry out the task assigned to him if he cannot adds a whole new layer of complexity to life for Dumbledore’s most peculiar ally. In the film, it arguably feels a little more obvious that Snape is playing the game very much on Dumbledore’s side still, although it must be borne in mind that by the time of this film, the seventh novel had already been released and eagerly devoured by fans such as myself two years prior, and so it’s difficult to compare like for like. When I (and others) read the book of Half-Blood Prince it was difficult to see how Snape could be playing on the level with the Order, having apparently murdered Dumbledore and fled into the night. Nonetheless, it does feel inevitably here as if Yates is maybe hinting a little too hard that there’s more than meets the eye to Snape’s apparent eagerness to assist Malfoy in his quest.

And while Malfoy slowly builds towards that quest – and kudos is due here to Yates and screenwriter Kloves for extracting sufficient tension from a plan which essentially entails repairing a magic cabinet to let some Death Eaters into Hogwarts and then heading off to finish Dumbledore himself anyway at an extremely narratively convenient juncture – Harry is engaged on a few quests of his own.

Firstly, he must slowly ingratiate himself with Slughorn, though Dumbledore waits some time to reveal exactly why. When he does, it’s still not clear exactly what the importance of the memory Dumbledore requires might be – only that it’s something which relates to young Voldemort, back when he was just the brilliant young pupil Tom Riddle. Finding out that Riddle was one of the ‘Slug Club’ – the young pupils selected and groomed by the professor as special who would go on to great things and allow him reflected glory – is one thing. Finding out that Slughorn may have been responsible for granting Voldemort his most terrible and frightening power is another altogether. Even now, I can’t help but feel that Slughorn’s protestations of how he could never have known Riddle’s true nature ring hollow, but that’s again possibly the benefit of hindsight.

He also must wrestle with the identity of the Half-Blood Prince, though here oddly the movie tends to focus less than the book. For example, in the movie it’s Ginny who persuades Harry to hide the book, as in the novel, but the reasoning Ginny has – that mysterious books whose previous owners deliver instructions are never good news in her experience – is never articulated here. Harry’s use of the Sectumsempra spell – lifted from the potions book – in his fight with Malfoy is brutal, but lacks the element of obvious sorrow on Harry’s part which is very present in the book. Here, Harry simply stands over Malfoy until Snape appears and then he goes away again – there is no confrontation between Snape and Harry on the subject of the spell until the very end when he attempts to use it while pursuing Snape. It’s possible that the sorrow Harry immediately feels in the book at using the spell and so grievously harming Draco is left out here because the film wants more obviously to set Malfoy as the enemy for Harry until the very end, but it does lead to a very different feel for our hero especially considering his hitherto very noble aspect.

Harry’s pursuit of Malfoy and the confrontations between the two are all equally brutal in this regard. We see early on that Malfoy is quite prepared not only to hurt Harry but to leave him to be lost in the world for however long. There’s a cold edge to Malfoy where there was hot-blooded arrogance before, to be expected when his father has been arrested and his family shamed. Malfoy is as eager to please Voldemort as Harry is Dumbledore, but where Harry is driven by love and affection – a sense that he owes Dumbledore loyalty, Draco is driven by abject fear, though it is arguable which he fears most – his family’s loss of status, a thing which has been made so very important to him by his own vainglorious father – or Voldemort himself and his well-known wrath. It’s interesting to observe how that fear drives Draco to cruelty but at the very end, confronted with the reality of what he has committed himself to do, he is unable to act, whereas Harry, driven and surrounded by love, is driven to attempt to grievously injure Snape when he feels he must. The love Harry feels creates a passion making him capable of the most immense cruelty, even as the fear that drives Draco immobilises him at the very moment of truth.

And then there’s Dumbledore. Here, we see the character perhaps at his absolute best and worst. His quest for the Horcruxes has viciously wounded him, yet still he continues, enlisting Harry’s help because he can trust no other. When we overhear Snape asking Dumbledore if he has ever considered that he asks too much, it’s not completely clear if he is referring to himself and his own tasks or to Harry, in hindsight. After all which Harry has endured, it’s a little difficult not to feel Dumbledore needlessly cruel, both in his insistence that Harry accompany him to retrieve the Horcrux from the cave, and in knowing that Harry would surely witness his apparent murder at the hands of Snape. It starts to beg the question of exactly where Dumbledore stands with regards to Harry – on the one hand he trusts him implicitly, enough to take him into his confidence with regards to the Horcruxes; on the other, he doesn’t trust him enough to tell him a truth about himself and Snape that could save Harry considerable pain and grief. On this re-watch, I was forced to concur with the old Potions Master – Dumbledore asks too much of many people, and though his intentions ultimately might be good, there is no escaping that one fact.

That said, we also see Dumbledore here at his noblest. He conceals the pain of his injuries from the cursed ring, he sacrifices himself at the lake, insisting to Harry that he alone must drink the poisoned water that conceals the Horcrux. Dumbledore bears pain in the most steadfast way, and he does to ensure the victory of good over a dark evil. His flaw is to sometimes forget that others do not necessarily share his powers of endurance, and therefore to – as Snape says – expect too much of them.

Alleviating all this darkness, we have the romance subplots – here we start to see the first earnest steps of the love between Ginny and Harry, with the attendant comical difficulties this causes for any young boy having romantic feelings towards his best friend’s sibling. In parallel, we see the continuing saga of Ron and Hermione’s will they/won’t they relationship, with Ron sidetracked by a relationship with Lavender Brown which causes Hermione to get quite vengeful. She’s more open with Harry here about her feelings than in the book, and that works because of the way the film is setting itself – we need that closeness between the two to offset some of the loneliness Harry feels elsewhere.

There’s also the general gift that is Rupert Grint’s comic feel. His timing is never less than perfect, and his tryout for the Quidditch team – bumped from the last film to this – is utter genius. His first match – assisted by his misconception that he’s swallowed a luck potion – gives us that first kiss between him and Lavender which begins the whole soppy (sloppy) romance, and its ending – as a comatose Ron mutters Hermione’s name in his sleep – is a touching moment which lasts as long as his illness does.

Overall, it’s hard in hindsight to feel that these ‘romcom’ elements overshadow the rest of what we see on screen. The film pulls no punches with regards to its violence and sense of threat. The attack on the Weasley’s home demonstrates the ruthlessness of the Death Eaters, who are just as happy to attack Ginny as Harry or anyone else. The vicious physicality of Malfoy, the effects of the Sectum Sempra spell and the awful sight of a weeping, wailing, screaming Dumbledore being forced by Harry to keep drinking all make for uncomfortable viewing. The lighter moments, far from detracting from the darkness, actually help to make it endurable, elevating what might have been too dark for younger audiences into bearable fare.

If there’s one genuine pleasure of critiquing movies, it’s being able to revisit them and come away with a different view on them. I never liked Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, until I watched it again and realised just how good it was. And you can’t say fairer than that.