Horror Movie Review Ghost Stories

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2017 – Spoiler alerts This low key British horror movie, based on a stage play by the same writers and some of the cast, features three ghost stories linked by a framing story into which they ultimately interlock brilliantly. It is genuinely scary, and probably best not watched if you are both timid and self-isolating at present. Andy Nyman plays Professor Philip Goodman, a notorious uncompromising sceptic famous for debunking fraudulent psychics and fake claims about the supernatural. He is challenged by his ageing, long considered missing presumed dead mentor, into solving three separate cases which he is told, will prove to him that the supernatural World is very real. Story one deals with a night-watchman, (Paul Whitehouse), who tells how he was freaked out by ghostly activity on a building site he was watching, The site was once a women’s lunatic asylum. Story Two, the best of the three to my mind, has a troubled teenager, played incredibly well by Alex Lawther as someone driven to the absolute edge of emotional and mental collapse. He stole his father’s car to drive to a party. Returning home down a woodland lane he ran someone over. When he checked who it was, it proved to be The Devil. The boy tried driving off but the car breaks down leaving him trapped as weird things happened in and around the car. Goodman is spooked by the tales but still sees no reason to find them anything but psychological trauma rooted neurosis. The third tale, told by Martin Freeman (Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit movies) tells how he, a rich tycoon, was preparing a crib room for his expected child but his wife was dying in labour and sending messages warning that her (their) child was less than human. The crib room is affected by poltergeist activity and the child is seemingly born right into its cot rather than at the hospital some distance away as the mother dies in labour. As the story ends and before Goodman can react, the narratives merge in unexpected, seemingly surreal but ultimately neatly explained ways that I won’t spoil here. It is quite astonishing and jaw dropping stuff, not for the faint hearted. It is reminiscent of 1960’s and 1970’s portmanteau story movies like Tales From The Crypt. Arthur Chappell