It takes confidence for a filmmaker to pitch a good two-thirds of their movie at a level that is just a little bit naff. It also takes confidence to tackle the portmanteau structure and find a framing device that isn’t hopelessly contrived. Ditto when it comes to expecting one’s audience to invest themselves in more than an hour of content which essentially seeds the clues for an extended coda that follows a rug-pull that some may find audacious and others an incitement to facepalm. It walks a very fine line, does ‘Ghost Stories’, and had it not been underpinned by so specific a commentary on guilt and sins of omission, it might well have fallen flat.
The portmanteau film is tricky to get right at the best of times, more so the horror portmanteau. Twenty or thirty minutes per story generally doesn’t offer much scope to establish character, develop tension or reconcile haunting with provenance while at the same time building towards a denouement. Inconsistency in tone is a pitfall, with even the greatest of creepy portmanteau films – Ealing Studio’s ‘Dead of Night’ – stumbling with the inclusion of a comedic tale.
Co-directors Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman structure ‘Ghost Stories’ around paranormal investigator Professor Phillip Goodman (Nyman), introduced in mockumentary style (a device that’s quickly abandoned) as he unmasks a celebrity medium. Goodman is contacted by a parapsychologist who has been missing for years; said individual is actually living in a caravan park in a shitty British seaside town, which is a pretty good working definition of being missing when you come to think about it. The grouchy old cove gives Goodman the files on three cases he couldn’t solve and – three cases he is convinced are proof that the supernatural exists – and challenges Goodman to prove him wrong.
The first concerns a night watchman (Paul Whitehouse) working at a former asylum who encounters the ghost of a child; the second a teenager (Alex Lawther) who borrows his parents’ car (they don’t know he failed his test) and runs over something that isn’t human; and the third a businessman (Martin Freeman) who witnesses poltergeist activity in the nursery room prepared for his unborn child while his wife is hospitalised. If I’ve not bothered identifying these characters by name, that’s because the script doesn’t bother fleshing them out beyond casually racist working class dude, nervy teenage dude and stuck-up rich dude. They are painted in such broad strokes that Whitehouse and Freeman skate the border of parody in their performances; Lawther fares better, probably because he carries over some creepy baggage from ‘The End of the Fucking World’ and the ‘Black Mirror’ episode “Shut Up and Dance”.
Even as the individual stories play out, there’s an off-ness about them. Much is made of the night watchman’s racism, yet he’s avuncular in the advice he gives to a Polish colleague and he regains his faith after receiving counselling from a black priest. The three cases are described as having troubled the parapsychologist for his whole career, yet the nervy teenage dude is still patently a teenager when Goodman shows up at his door to reopen the case. His interview with the businessman just gets weirder and weirder until Dyson and Nyman execute the first of several rug pulls.
Numbers and symbols proliferate. The imagery becomes ever more jarring and the juxtapositions stranger. Then the film dials back the weirdness as everything comes together and the big reveal takes into the realms of decidedly non-supernatural horror. Horror that comes from urban realism. Horror that connects to an historical and specifically twentieth century evil.
There are screeds to be written about the last quarter of an hour or so of ‘Ghost Stories’ and there is much to be said about religion, guilt and the nature of sin. But that would entail going so far into spoiler territory as to lay the entire film bare and leave not a sliver of discovery or enjoyment (if that’s the right word) to the viewer coming to it anew. The viewer coming to it without any preconceptions, except that they might – just might – have their head comprehensively fucked with.
That’s “just might” as in “almost certainly” by the way.
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