Film / Reviews
Review: The Ghoul
The Ghoul (15)
UK 2016 83 mins Dir: Gareth Tunley Cast: Tom Meeten, Alice Lowe, Rufus Jones, Niamh Cusack, Geoffrey McGivern, James Eyres Kenward
Summoned to the scene of a double murder, homicide detective Chris (Meeten) is confronted by a baffling mystery. Forensic evidence suggests the victims were shot multiple times by an intruder, but simply carried on walking. Suspicion falls upon a man named Michael Coulson (Jones) – a ‘ghoul’, who’s obsessed with crime scenes. Learning that Coulson is being treated by a psychotherapist named Fisher (Cusack), Chris enlists the help of ex-girlfriend Kathleen (Lowe) to go undercover as a patient in the hope of unearthing the truth about what appears to be a supernatural crime.
If this seems a tad improbable, not to mention unethical, be reassured that things are about to take a turn for the very weird indeed. Those who are lured by the synopsis into anticipating a police procedural – or hope that the title signals a pleasingly lurid cheapjack horror flick – are likely to feel cheated. What actor-turned-director Gareth Tunley delivers is a meditation on identity for which the description ‘Lynchian’ is mandatory. Ben Wheatley serves as executive producer, and there are certain similarities with his own Kill List (in which Tunley had a small role), whose straightforward premise also spun off into a feast of magnificent strangeness. Indeed, Wheatley is the nexus of a many-tentacled flourishing of imaginative homegrown horror-thrillers, with just one degree of separation linking many of its principals. The Ghoul star Tom Meeten had a role alongside Alice Lowe in Wheatley’s Sightseers and also starred in the enjoyably preposterous Aaaaaaaah! from that film’s co-writer, Steve Oram. Lowe, meanwhile, recently branched out into directing with the hugely entertaining Prevenge.
Without giving too much away, mental illness and occult arcana play their part in The Ghoul‘s looping narrative, with plentiful knowing references to Möbius strips and Klein bottles. Pulling this kind of stuff off without being sucked into a fundament of self-satisfied cleverness can be a challenge, but Tunley is ably assisted by Tom Meeten, who grounds the film with an impressively intense performance as the hunched, unshaven, socially awkward and tormented Chris, portraying him as a tightly wound ball of internalised pain. It’s also impossible to dislike a film in which someone delivers the priceless threat: “Either you tell me what’s bothering you or I’m going to start banging on about alchemy and maths again.”
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