Ghost Stories (2017)

The Ghost Stories film comes to us off the back of a much-praised stage play of the same title by two of our finest writers, Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson: at the time it was doing the rounds some years ago, I managed to immure myself against hearing even the barest hint of what it was all about, in the hopes that I’d get to go and see it (which I didn’t) whilst having no expectations which could spoil the show. Happily, I’ve managed to go on hearing nothing at all ahead of seeing the film. This is where I think it’s only fair to extend the same courtesy to anyone who might be reading this. In order to discuss Ghost Stories in any meaningful way, I’m going to have to talk about what happens and how it plays out. This will by no means be a plot synopsis, but nonetheless this review may contain mild spoilers from here on in.

The basic set-up is this: lapsed Jew Professor Philip Goodman (Nyman) has spent his professional and academic life trying to compensate for an unhappy upbringing, where his family’s religious values clashed with the world as he came to understand it. After a revelatory moment as a child watching the TV sceptic Charles Cameron disproving all manner of supernatural phenomena, citing people’s ‘existential terror’ as the reason they are so ready to believe in the impossible, Goodman sets to very similar work, dismantling people’s beliefs for a TV show of his very own (in an uncomfortable early scene where he storms the stage at a spiritual mediumship event, further devastating an already devastated bereaved mother in the process; it seems the medium and the sceptic are all too ready to tread on her feelings for their own agendas, and I found it one of the hardest scenes in the film to watch.)

The funny thing is, Cameron himself had disappeared into obscurity in mysterious circumstances of his own decades previously – so Goodman is astounded to receive (earthly) communication from the still-living Cameron (Leonard Byrne) who wants to speak with him. He tells Goodman that, during his professional career, he encountered three cases which assured him that his whole world view had been wrong – that there were things out there which cannot be easily explained. Investigate them for yourself, he tells the younger man, and then come and talk to me. Duly, though with the somewhat frustrated air of a man who has met one of his heroes and come away disappointed, Goodman agrees to seek out and speak to the people in each case.

Ah, the portmanteau film: it’s well known that Nyman, and Dyson (as can be seen from the earliest League of Gentlemen days) are big fans of 70s heyday British horror, and the three-in-one framework here is worthy – and reminiscent – of the old Amicus films. In each of the three stories Goodman hears, we are transported into the situation each new man reports; these cover a range of different phenomena. Tony Matthews (Paul Whitehouse) relates a story of a frightening experience as a nightwatchman; Simon Rifkind (Alex Lawther) talks about what goes on in the woods, and finally businessman Mike Priddle (Martin Freeman) explains about a night he felt deeply unsafe at home…in each case, Goodman is primed to dismiss their accounts as the ramblings of trauma, addiction, guilt, grief – you name it. But then odd phenomena begin to leech into his own life, and he’s forced to examine his own motivations, as he comes to terms with how he has impacted upon the lives of others.

There are a great many things in favour of this film, and chief amongst those is – for me – in its visual trickery. The flashy BOO! scenes which punctuate the film (no doubt after the stage play, which itself probably picked up a lot of cues from that stalwart of horror theatre, The Woman in Black) I could take or leave. I find them too easy to see coming, too much more about the reflexes than the imagination. However, what these BOO! moments certainly do achieve is to set you on edge, so that your brain is ready to see things which aren’t there. I haven’t read up on the making of the film, but I’m willing to bet all or at least most of these tricks of the eye are deliberate. ‘The brain sees what it wants to see’, and so on. There are also several nods to other classic British ghost tales – which I won’t name here – but these work with the tales at hand, and don’t feel unnecessarily tacked on. I tell you what else I thought of, and I might be alone in this, but if you’ve ever read the (terrifying) series of books issued by Fortean Times called ‘It Happened To Me’, where utterly ordinary people write in with their supernatural experiences – some of the tales in the film are strongly reminiscent of stories I’ve read there, particularly the middle story, though this may of course be entirely coincidental. In any case, it’s great to see a cast of such well-known British actors, often comedy actors, taking on something quite as dark as Ghost Stories and doing a superb job, even managing to blend in a few moments of gallows humour without dissipating the horror.

However, the weight of expectation with films like this, particularly after having waited so long to find out what all the fuss was about, means I do have some nagging issues with the film as a whole. [Final warning on spoilers ahead.] Firstly, I understand completely that the writers want to resolve things in such a way that they don’t simply cede to the whole ‘and it was REAL!’ shtick, any more than it’d be sane to roll credits on a Bobby Ewing ending, but to get us to this quite neat – yes, clever – yes, but still ambiguous ending, I felt the film was…well, the only way I can explain it is to say it’s reactionary, in the sense that it turns all of these stories and fears into the residual agonies of a suicidal man, and in fact the whole film seems to point to him wanting to die and going through all of this purgatorial suffering because of something he didn’t do as a terrified, victimised child. It’s hardly the most eloquent thing to say, but it feels so… mean-spirited somehow, even though I am fully aware that a horror film has no duty to be nice and even-handed. I’m also torn on the whole ‘fourth wall’ thing in the final act – always a fraught decision, even if a useful bridging device between straightforward supernatural horror and the existential torture of the ending.

So, for me, Ghost Stories is a film which does many things superbly well, pays its dues, certainly kept my attention, led to some fantastically creepy moments, but also slathers on a veneer of human nastiness that I am finding unusually bitter, in a way which actually surprises me.

Ghost Stories (2017) is on general release in UK cinemas now.