The Ghoul (2016)

Möebius Trip

The Ghoul (2016)
UK 2016 Directed by Gareth Tunley
Arrow Blu Ray Zone 2

The Ghoul, not to be confused with any of the other famous films of the exact same name (why do directors keep doing this?), is the feature length debut of writer/director Gareth Tunley. It’s somewhat gritty in the atmosphere it tries to create and this is in no small way because of the earthy portrayal of the leading protagonist Chris, played by Tom Meeten. The film starts off with the old chestnut of roads and highways observed through the front windscreen of a car... a staple of many movie opening sequences, especially gialli and polizia... and at first this film does kind of dupe the audience into the idea that this is a British polizia in nature.

After Chris has journeyed from Manchester to London, by way of these opening credits, we find out that he’s a police detective and he turns up to investigate a bizarre shooting. He’s given the facts as they are presumably witnessed (something which didn’t quite sit right with me from the start), of an investigation sparked off from the deaths of a man and a woman in a house. The murder itself as described conjures up those wonderful black and white monster movies from the 1940s (and through all the way through the decades to their contemporary counterparts) of the Frankenstein/Mummy/Zombie/Vampire/insert any other likely candidate here... as it shambles towards the hero who puts various bullets through said scoundrel’s body while the thing keeps on staggering towards its target. How, in real life, can this be? Chris has to go and find out and with the advice of his once girlfriend Kathleen (played by the wonderful Alice Lowe), he has to discover just what is going on so he goes undercover to see the therapist of the estate agent who let the police in, who is under suspicion and from here on in the stage is set for a film which, for the first twenty minutes or so, does successfully disorient the viewer as to whether all that prelude actually is the real set up to the story or not.

So, yeah, the first twenty minutes in and the main narrative starts to quite overtly suggest that Chris’ role as a detective is just something he’s made up in the personae of his depression ridden patient... or is it the other way around? For the first twenty minutes or so the writer/director successfully makes you doubt your own perceptions of what is going on and this is the puzzle which is boldly put in front of the audience. Actually, it turns out it’s quite an easy puzzle to solve, as all the clues are put before you and quite clearly underlined so my main problem with this whole scenario was... why would a psychoanalyst take on someone who doesn’t work for a living and presumably can’t pay the bills. I guess it’s possible he could have spent some years on an NHS waiting list but, they are very long waiting lists from what I understand and that doesn’t really help the case if you are supposed to believe that this character is possibly an undercover cop.

The film looks good and it has a certain dreamlike quality to it. The central character inhabits a world which is pretty much a land of confusion and some of the compositions are particularly nice in expressing this, such as a shot looking through the windscreen of a car at Chris and with the car presumably circling because the tops of the surrounding buildings and sky are looping around the reflection like a ferris wheel... which is another clue for the way in which the story progresses, as it happens. I also noticed the director kind of favours highlighting things at the centre of the wide aspect ratio frame and he gets some nice shot designs out of this. For example, when Chris goes to covertly rifle through a filing cabinet, we have the open doorway into the room holding said filing cabinet through which we watch Chris, with a blank wall on the left and another, unopened door filling the right of screen, firmly focusing your attention on the antics of the central character.

The soundtrack helps too, with Waen Shepherd’s score feeling like it’s been heavily influenced by Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Alfred Hitchcock. Indeed, one of a set of dialogue free sequences where Chris is following a ‘possible suspect’ feels almost like the long, pursuit and observation scene where Jimmy Stewart stalks Kim Novak in the early stages of Vertigo (another film which starts off using images portraying loops... I’ll get onto this loop idea in just a second).

Chris gets through two psychologists through the course of the movie and, if you close your eyes when the second one, Morland, is introduced, you might recognise the voice of the original Ford Prefect from the radio show The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy as this important character in the film’s narrative is played by none other than Geoffrey McGivern.

Now, the thing is, this film really does give away all the clues and the solution to the puzzle of the central narrative when Morland starts talking about the Klein bottle on this shelf, leading into him demonstrating a simple Möebius Strip and then talking about the worm Ouroboros symbol and, by this point, you’ll probably be in no doubt as to how the movie is going to end and who, in fact, are the people killed in that shoot out we hear about at the start of the story. Which is a pity because, for the first twenty minutes to half an hour, at least, the director really had me questioning things.

Ultimately, this movie is technically a thriller, in that it uses the language of the genre to present its central narrative but, if you’re expecting a straight up example of that then you might be in for a bit of a disappointment. That being said, apart form the ease with which one can unwind the central narrative, once you know the trick (and the literal translation of it would not seem out of place in an old Amicus horror piece from the 1960s), it’s not a bad movie and one which I’m sure many people will find kind of interesting, if a little laboured in some places. Not bad for a piece of British cinema with a very English stamp to it. Not the worst I’ve seen in this kind of area and worth a watch for the actors and expression of the central idea alone. So maybe give The Ghoul a go when you have a wet afternoon in the house.