Ghost Stories, distributed by IFC Midnight, is directed and written by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman and adapted from their stage play which opened in Liverpool in 2010. The play was notable for its warning that no one under 15 should attend and also for its asking the audience to keep its “secrets.” Like the play, the film definitely deserves to have its secrets kept, and this review is without spoilers. I do know, though, that I’ll undoubtedly write about Ghost Stories in the future because it’s a film with an ending that needs to be talked about. And it’s brilliant. It’s the best horror film I’ve watched in 2018. (While Ghost Stories premiered at the London Film Festival in late 2017, so technically it’s a 2017 film, it didn’t arrive in the US until 2018.)
Ghost Stories centers on Professor Phillip Goodman (Andy Nyman), a profound skeptic who devotes his life to debunking what he sees as the superstitious and destructive delusions of believers. A short home video that plays near the opening of the film explains Goodman’s zeal. As he says, “My father’s religious beliefs destroyed our family.” To Goodman, religious faith, or any faith in the supernatural, is a product of humans’ having to confront mortality and death; it’s a way of dealing with “existential terror.” And he believes it’s a self-deceptive way of dealing with that terror. Goodman lives his life believing one must confront the terror of existence and death, not evade it through lies. His entire life is built on the bedrock of “material evidence” –of apprehending the reality in front of your eyes. The film, not surprisingly, challenges that view.
Here’s the official trailer:
One day, Goodman gets a letter from a scholar he’s admired enormously but who disappeared mysteriously several decades ago. When Goodman visits Charles Cameron in his caravan on a desolate stretch of coastline, Cameron tells Goodman he’s dying. He also tells Goodman that his life’s work is “shit,” that he’s wrong to discount that there’s another reality, one that can’t be seen. He then hands Goodman three cases that Cameron, who himself had devoted his life to debunking the supernatural, could never explain. He challenges Goodman to explain them.
Goodman (Andy Nyman) arrives at Charles Cameron’s caravan
Goodman heads off to explain the inexplicable, visiting Tony Matthews (Paul Whitehouse), a night watchman in a former correctional facility, Simon Rifkind (Alex Lawther), a teen boy who lives with utterly detached parents, and Mike Priddle (Martin Freeman), a successful financier called “the Prophet.” All three had terrifying encounters with the seemingly supernatural—and, one by one, they tell their stories to Goodman. In each case, the film shifts from narrative to flashback, and viewers get to see what these men saw, what traumatized them so thoroughly.
Priddle (Martin Freeman) with Goodman
It’s not giving anything away to say that the three cases—the three ghost stories of the title—are connected. Like Goodman, the viewer has to scour the stories for their truth and their meaning. What’s going on here? With each story, you’re pulled further into the realm of the inexplicable. Goodman seems confident after he’s heard the first two men that he can explain both supernatural experiences through the men’s psychology, through their lives. “The brain sees what it wants to see,” he says, in a line that gets reiterated throughout the film. The third story seems to shake Goodman’s confidence in his rational abilities more profoundly, though, and as Priddle’s story comes to an end, the audience, like Goodman, starts to doubt everything they’ve been seeing and hearing. As Priddle says to Goodman as he’s unlocking his gun case on the windswept Yorkshire moors, in one of those brilliant moments of screenwriting, “Why is it always the last key that unlocks everything?”
In an otherwise bleak, dark, mise-en-scene, there are uncanny bursts of yellow
Everything about Ghost Stories is simply spectacular. Andy Nyman as Goodman, Martin Freeman as Mike Priddle, and Alex Lawther as Simon Rifkind are particularly brilliant. But the show-stopper is the story—the thing I can’t talk about here, exactly—the richly layered, slowly developing, and profound narrative. By the end, Ghost Stories has confronted you with the question: What is a “ghost” story exactly? What is a ghost? Conversely, what is reality? The film questions the very substance of what we think we know, the foundation upon which we construct our lives and our being. How substantial, exactly, is that substance, is that foundation? How do we know ourselves and our world? These are the questions that I believe all horror fiction and film raises in some degree or another, but Ghost Stories, by the end, puts them front and center. It’s a deeply philosophical film as well as being utterly compelling to watch and also terrifying.
Tunnels, and a dark faceless figure in a parka, become more prominent visually as the film progresses
There are signs in the film that Dyson and Nyman were influenced by the tradition of English ghost stories, and the film particularly evokes M. R. James’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (1904) and Charles Dickens’ “The Signal-Man” (1866), both of which were adapted for the BBC in 1968 and 1976, respectively. “The Signalman” is more directly present in Ghost Stories, with shots of tunnels and even a scene shot on train tracks by a signal. The central tension of Dickens’ story and its TV adaptation is echoed in Ghost Stories, moreover: something is bearing down on Goodman, something of which he gets eerie warnings, but something that he is unable to see. After you’ve seen this film, you may wonder what might be bearing down on you.
Ghost Stories has knocked my prior #1 horror release of the year, The Ritual, off its perch. Interestingly, both were released to streaming platforms.
Grade: A+
Ghost Stories is available to rent or buy on Amazon:
