In short: Ghost Story (1974)

McFayden (Murray Melvin), a product of the British upper class if ever you’ll see one, has invited two former college friends to an old mansion. I say friends, but as a matter of fact, McFayden, Duller (Vivian MacKerrell) – the unpleasant product of the “sportsman” archetype – and the middle-class and clearly still suffering from bad memories of his school days Talbot (Larry Dann), didn’t really run in the same circles way back when. McFayden and Duller, connected by class if nothing else, start bullying and “teasing” Talbot in ways subtle and blunt.

Instead of simply exploding, or going somewhere else where a perfectly nice guy like him might be appreciated, Talbot begins seeing ghosts and visions about the mansion and its past, reliving a tale of cruelty and madness that slowly unfolds and attempts to envelop the man trapped in it whole.

This British film directed by Stephen “I made two movies about the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and they are both terrible in completely different ways” Weeks, with a script by Philip Norman and Rosemary Sutcliff (whom I know as the author of well-regarded historical novels for teenagers like “The Eagle of the 9th”, written before YA existed as a label or the genre it is today) is quite a pleasant surprise to me. Despite its title – and some knowing nods towards M.R. James – this is not a traditional ghost story in the antiquarian – nor the Victorian – manner,  but a film that uses its ghostly apparitions metaphorically to confront the sins of the past, in this case the psychological fall-out of the British class system, colonialism and the repression of women.

I’m not typically a fan of the “ghost as a metaphor” approach, yet the script simply makes it so engaging – if in a somewhat theatrical manner – there’s really no arguing against it. Characters are deeper and more complex than the stand-ins for their class they at first appear to be, and even the more melodramatic elements of the plot always feel organic and absolutely appropriate, earned by the film’s intelligence.

And even though Ghost Story really isn’t so much about the supernatural as the supernatural, and more like someone from the Pinter school of British stage writing trying their hand at a ghost story, there is still room for delightfully creepy moments in it; in a couple of scenes, this even seems to evoke the careful and ambiguous strangeness of British writers of the Weird like Aickman and de la Mare, not something one encounters on screen very often, and certainly not done as well as it is here.