The Ghoul

There’s a sequence right in the mid­dle of Gareth Tunley’s debut fea­ture, The Ghoul, which sees a dread­locked Paul Kaye reel off a geezer­ish yarn about an illic­it cash drop being made to some kind of a ter­ri­fy­ing gang­land over­lord. It’s a com­pelling lit­tle mid­night entr’acte, beau­ti­ful­ly writ­ten and deliv­ered with a lairy rel­ish, right down to its ethe­re­al punch­line. You might even say that it recalls Guy Ritchie at his earthy best.

Sad­ly, lit­tle else in this under­pow­ered, low bud­get psy­cho noir match­es this sim­ple, effec­tive and affect­ing mono­logue. The remain­der, in fact, recalls the worst of Guy Ritchie – the con­trived com­plex­i­ties, the schol­ar­ly pre­ten­tions and a hol­low emo­tion­al core.

This might be down to an emo­tion­al­ly frag­ile cen­tral char­ac­ter whose motives and mind­set appear to alter from scene to scene. It’s hard to tell if this is inten­tion­al, or the result of Tom Meeten’s unsub­tly sub­tle turn as angu­lar, self-styled under­cov­er cop Chris. If he is an under­cov­er cop, he’s per­haps the least con­vinc­ing, least qual­i­fied and most prone to blow­ing his cov­er in the his­to­ry of crime cinema.

But these are ques­tion marks sur­round­ing to his true per­sona. They are pur­pose­ful­ly left vis­i­ble, allow­ing for Chris’s iden­ti­ty to mutate as the film put­ters and writhes on, par­tic­u­lar­ly as his unlike­ly inves­ti­ga­tion con­cerns his own con­nec­tion to real­i­ty. Ini­tial­ly bor­row­ing a set-up from the Samuel Fuller clas­sic, Shock Cor­ri­dor, the film sees Chris sup­pos­ed­ly fak­ing depres­sion as an excuse to vis­it the psy­cho­an­a­lyst of a mur­der­er who is poten­tial­ly still at large (qual­i­fi­ca­tions are used here as noth­ing is absolute). From there the plot spi­rals out fran­ti­cal­ly as Chris becomes friend­ly with anoth­er patient, switch­es to a new shrink who starts gab­bing about mag­ic and becomes a lit­tle stir crazy in his cell-like flat.

The prob­lem with the film is that it is a puz­zle movie which con­stant­ly dan­gles the answers in front of the screen like gar­ish baubles. It’s as if Tun­ley doesn’t quite trust his own ambi­tious sto­ry­line so has to con­stant­ly resort to spoon-feed­ing clues, like char­ac­ters talk­ing – apro­pos of very lit­tle – about para­dox­i­cal con­structs such as Möbius strips or Klein bot­tles. Chris descends into para­noia and the film duly frag­ments into a mash of pre­cip­i­tous tonal shifts and blurts of jar­ring music.

Alice Lowe brings a touch of heart as the unat­tain­able object of Chris’s affec­tions, but it’s not enough. The film even­tu­al­ly folds in on itself in a ges­ture of emp­ty tech­ni­cal bravu­ra, leav­ing lots of ugly visu­als and overde­ter­mined edits and very lit­tle in the way of a sat­is­fy­ing, over-arch­ing drama.

That said, there’s mox­ie to burn and props to Tun­ley for at least attempt­ing to forge some­thing that proud­ly runs with its lunatic premise and clutch of bizarre, even irri­tat­ing char­ac­ters. Chalk this one up as a noble fail­ure then, but we’ll def­i­nite­ly be in the queue to see what he comes up with next.