Thumb through a genre textbook
“We have to be so very careful about what we believe,” a very reassuring and overly confident professor Philip Goodman reminds us at the outset of Ghost Stories. This premise, that we must question our beliefs and those in whom we place our trust, is the central theme that undergirds a film that is often tempted to slide into cliche, but which ultimately satisfies as a genre entertainment with a theatrical flourish
We begin with Professor Goodman, plying his trade as a debunker of all things supernatural and paranormal, until he receives a mysterious packet from a long lost colleague who is long disappeared, and presumed dead. One much-poured over file folder containing three “unsolvable” accounts later, and our good doctor Goodman sets off once again, eagerly awaiting his next debunking triumph. Things, as they say, don’t go as planned.
The film plays out in three interlocking stories, with one doozy of an ending. The writer-director team of Andy Nyman (Nyman also plays Professor Goodman) and Jeremy Dyson know their genre playbook, and know their audience very well, and so include just about every known acting, story, and filmmaking trope known to the horror genre. Lights flicker and die. Background figures suddenly become foreground figures. Camera angles jump from low to high. Frames go crooked, and that’s in the first five minutes. Not to forget that each of the stories includes elements like an insane asylum for women, an overly excitable boy (played way, way over the top by Alex Lawther) who really shouldn’t have been out there all alone, late at night, on that forest road, without a license, and, of course, a pregnancy gone demonically wrong. The film showcases Martin Freeman, who enters in the third story about a wealthy executive and his wife trying to have a baby. Freeman isn’t known for, and has admitted to, not caring much for the horror genre, and his various performances here land with a note of casualness — and even mirth — that offer a satisfying counterpoint to everything else.
Ghost Stories originated as a pared-down play from Nyman and Dyson in 2010, and was a huge success. Adapting it to a film might have tempted the two to stick to the script’s anchorage in the telling of the three stories, but the filmmakers clearly wanted to try out a new box of paints with the film. As the film churns through its stories, the sense arises that so many horror elements can’t be deployed all at once. There must be something else going on. And when we find out just what exactly that is, it’s a treat to revel in being placed squarely in one genre, only to have that genre exploded for something that’s quite original, and, ultimately, very entertaining.
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Ghost Stories starts a limited run today at: Landmark’s Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness Avenue (near San Francisco’s Civic Center) – (415) 771-0183, and at Landmark’s Shattuck Cinemas, 2230 Shattuck Avenue, one block from UC Berkeley – (510) 644-2992.
