Ghost Sto­ries

Through the eyes of four men from very dif­fer­ent walks of life, co-writ­ers and direc­tors Andy Nyman and Jere­my Dyson take us on a guid­ed tour of bot­tled-up male anguish and a crum­bling British soci­ety. This unnerv­ing com­pendi­um has made the tran­si­tion from a suc­cess­ful inter­na­tion­al stage show (whose fan­base includes the direc­tor John Lan­dis) to the big screen and draws inspi­ra­tion from a rich his­to­ry of hor­ror, recall­ing the chill­ing and night­mar­ish qual­i­ty of films includ­ing the Ami­cus antholo­gies and 1945 port­man­teau, Dead of Night.

Nyman plays our prag­mat­ic guide through three sep­a­rate super­nat­ur­al tales, Pro­fes­sor Good­man, an aca­d­e­m­ic who has devot­ed his life to debunk­ing myths and tak­ing down fraud­u­lent psy­chics. We first meet the adult Good­man snatch­ing away com­fort from a griev­ing moth­er at a live clair­voy­ant show – and with that the film begins its line of enquiry into con­fronting harsh truths and chal­leng­ing beliefs. Good­man is tak­en on a mys­te­ri­ous jour­ney to a car­a­van park on the coast, where he is sent on a mis­sion to solve a series of inex­plic­a­ble haunt­ings. The howl­ing wind of the off-sea­son Eng­lish shore is a cold and lone­ly place and pro­vides a star­tling and fit­ting loca­tion to trawl through themes of iso­la­tion, grief and guilt.

Paul White­house turns in a per­for­mance that is part nasty and part sym­pa­thet­ic as bit­ter, work­ing-class wid­ow­er Tony Matthews. Good­man meets Tony in a desert­ed, musty pub where he sinks down a short and a pint and casts his mem­o­ry back to the time when he worked as a night watch­man in an aban­doned asy­lum for women.

Next up is a dis­turbed young man named Simon Rifkind (Alex Lawther) who is still liv­ing at home with his par­ents. He’s dis­traught at what he is con­vinced was an encounter with the dev­il years pre­vi­ous­ly. His bed­room walls are a shrine to the hoofed beast aside from a cheer­ful snap of Sooty and Sweep.

There’s humour among all the tragedy but Dyson and Nyman don’t over­play it. The cam­era is con­tin­u­al­ly poked into Lawther’s pained expres­sions as he con­torts his face under spooky red lights and the dark­ness of wind­ing coun­try lanes. Lawther’s face in these unbear­ably tense scenes resem­bles Maxwell Frere’s ventriloquist’s dum­my in Dead of Night and also brings to mind Michael Redgrave’s affect­ing per­for­mance in the same film. Final­ly, Good­man con­venes with flat-cap wear­ing busi­ness­man, Mike Prid­dle (Mar­tin Free­man) in a vast, emp­ty field where he is des­per­ate­ly search­ing for his hunt­ing rifle.

All the male char­ac­ters who fea­tures in Ghost Sto­ries are haunt­ed by ter­ri­ble mis­for­tune that has mor­phed into an acute sense of pan­ic and self-loathing. Dyson and Nyman have stat­ed there are some per­son­al demons in the film and, as they look back to the late 1970s and their youth, they also can­ni­ly trans­fer a bleak mood of soci­etal and pri­vate dis­con­tent to the present day. They explore uncom­fort­able top­ics such as racism, reces­sion, men­tal health and trou­bling per­son­al beliefs in a tru­ly unnerv­ing way, but also deliv­er huge emo­tion­al heft by imbu­ing in their char­ac­ters with a con­vinc­ing vulnerability.