In short: Ghost Stories (2017)

Warning: I need to discuss the film’s ending during the course of the post, so if you want to pretend to be surprised, better don’t read on!

Professor Goodman (Andy Nyman) is a professional debunker of psychics and psychic phenomena with a lot of personal baggage. Because that sort of thing always happens to people like him in the movies, his big role model Charles Cameron - now elderly, clearly dying and living in a trailer – invites him to his home, such as it is, to berate him and to give him an envelope containing the three cases that convinced him his and Goodman’s respective life’s works were misguided. Much of the film consists of Goodman following up on these stories, and getting them told via flashback in your typical ghost anthology style.

However, there’s something rather different going on here than it first appears to be.

Given all the excited reviews by people whose tastes I generally appreciate I’ve read about Ghost Stories, I went into Jeremy Dyson’s and Andy Nyman’s movie based on their (equally well received) stage play expecting to feel a bit of excitement myself, but as it stands, much of the film leaves me cold, while a certain amount of it just plain annoys me.

I certainly have mentioned it here over the years from time to time, but if there’s one style of ending I particularly loathe in a piece of supernatural horror, it is the old “it was all a dream, a coma fantasy or the hallucinations of people who are already dead” cop out, something that has been sucking meaning, joy and effect out of films for more than a hundred years now. To be fair to the filmmakers, in the case of Ghost Stories, this ending is not supposed to be a cop out but rather the actual point of the film. The tales we are told and their surroundings are meant to mirror the psychological state and the details of comatose Goodman’s surroundings, with even the presence of women in the tales only as ghosts and shadows being a point made about the man’s life, and nearly everything we see actually meaningful. Unfortunately, meaningful doesn’t necessarily mean interesting, and while the ghost stories themselves are loaded with connections to Goodman’s traumata and hang-ups, they are only very basic as ghost stories, though stuffed with many allusions to other movies and books, with little happening in them any viewer won’t have seen a thousand times before. They are meant to be pretty bland, I believe, but the boringness of a film’s elements being purposeful doesn’t actually make them less boring.

I’d probably be quite a bit more tolerant of the film being all metaphorical about everything if I ever got the impression Goodman’s actually interesting enough of a character to spend a whole movie in his coma fantasies, but as far as it goes, his psychology seems terribly generic to me, the supernatural as metaphor not enhancing our view into his mind as much as it should but rather working as a way for the film to avoid actual psychological insight. Bergman this is not.


All this is a particular shame since the level of filmmaking craft on display here is considerable, genre knowledge and a technical eye for detail standing in service of a film that is not as deep as it seems to think it is.