Ghost Stories (2018
Written and Dir. by Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson
Starring Andy Nyman, Martin Freeman, Paul
Whitehouse, Alex Lawther
Here’s the problem with
watching an absolutely unhealthy, physically exhausting, emotionally deadening
amount of movies. No, it has nothing to do with the socially isolating effects
of forgoing the last vestiges of real human experience to follow the flickering
siren of obscure horror cinema, don’t be stupid. The problem is, eventually,
you see pretty much everything.
I don’t mean, of course,
that you literally run out of new material (there are still CRITTERS sequels I
haven’t seen, for God’s sake!), I mean that you eventually just see so many
iterations of the same narrative and stylistic tricks that they lose every
lingering remnant of their once-potent ability to surprise you. There is a
never-ending stream of new movies, but they increasingly reveal themselves to
be merely thinly repackaged iterations of older ones, familiar as an old shoe,
and about as exciting. Twists which once blew your mind, you can now
confidently identify from a trailer. Clever narrative sleights of hand get
repeated so often that you have pet names for them all. Eventually you find
yourself getting uneasy 15 minutes into some indie thriller, and furtively
asking “this isn’t going to turn out to be another fucking time loop cop-out is
it?” In short, nearly everything you watch becomes predictable (to an alarming
degree of accuracy) just by virtue of revealing its basic structure -- not
through any particular fault of its own, but simply due to the titanic amount
of predictive power all that accumulated experience with the medium brings.
That
might sound a bit dispiriting, but it’s honestly not as bad as all that.
Despite the obsessive, almost fanatical emphasis fanboy culture now puts
on avoiding “spoilers,” (a phenomenon of modern vintage, I think --at least in
degree-- possibly traceable directly to the unbelievable hype surrounding the
release of the STAR WARS prequels*) some foreknowledge is not entirely
incongruous with enjoying a narrative tale. Sure, experiencing a story for the
first time is usually going to produce a greater impact than subsequent
tellings, but the joy of most narratives is found in the journey, not in some
abrupt twist or turnaround which can be “spoiled.” This is particularly true in
genre fare, where basic story structure is necessarily somewhat fixed and
rigid, but it’s largely true for fiction in general; most stories are
build around recognizable archetypes, so the emphasis becomes less about the
unravelling of a plot and more about the unique details of this particular
iteration. We don’t doubt that James Bond is gonna bed the girl and route the
bad guy, we don’t doubt that Jason is gonna hack up those horny camp
counselors, and we know roughly how they’re going to go about it. There’s
nothing narrative to “spoil”; the pleasure is in the experience of watching it.
Not every film is quite
as heavily invested in formula as those two examples, of course, but even films
with more significant narrative “twists” often hold up smartly upon rewatch.
Hell, there are even cases where a movie is probably better once its
surprise has been revealed; I certainly felt that way about REGRESSION,
a movie whose arguable strengths are found entirely upon the ostensible
revelation of its secrets. And come on, is TOTAL RECALL less fun once you know
the nuts and bolts of its story? Absolutely not. Does the fact that every
single living human learns --apparently in utero-- the “twists” in EMPIRE
STRIKES BACK and PLANET OF THE APES and SOYLENT GREEN make them any less
enduring? Their shocking twists are so iconic that, to modern audiences, they
barely even read as though they were ever intended to be surprising. And yet
they remain unflaggingly popular and beloved, perhaps even more universally now
than when they still retained their ability to surprise.
So a movie which
indulges in a game-changing twist is hardly a lost cause, and hardly in bad
company -- or even exclusively modern company, for that matter. 1920’s THE
CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI has a twist ending, for fuck’s sake. And if you want to
trace its lineage even further back, it’s a simple matter to follow a thread
that leads you to Robert Chambers, and Ambrose Bierce, and probably rightfully
to Poe (maybe further, though older examples elude me. Anyone think of one?).
But while plenty of
stories which include a shocking twist may still maintain their potency
upon subsequent viewings, the prospects for films which are fundamentally built
on surprise tend to be dimmer. Whodunnits, for example --with their
singular narrative focus on the solution to a mystery-- can find themselves
much diminished once their secrets have been revealed, as can movies which
deliberately identify and subvert the audiences’ narrative expectations in an
attempt to catch them off guard (for example, the rote role-reversals of the JJ
Abrams STAR TREK reboot). So too can works of fiction which don’t particularly
traffic in shocking twists, but rather prioritize provocative conceptual
conceits over compelling narrative content (a friend of mine was recently
bemoaning his disappointment in reading an anthology of early sci-fi short
stories and finding it comprised mainly of perfunctory plotlines built around
great sci-fi concepts… concepts which, unfortunately, had been so thoroughly
cannibalized and scavenged by subsequent genre writers that they barely even
registered anymore, leaving the reader with a very lean meal indeed.) But of
course, the subset of fiction most vulnerable to the kryptonite of
foreknowledge combines the two, packaging a radical conceptual element as
a shocking narrative turn. And so it is that otherwise perfectly adequate
meat-and-potatoes horror movies become overcome by hubris enough to point their
artistic wings of wax straight at the sun on the hottest day of the summer.
That sun, of course, is the twist-ending mindfuck.
The mindfuck thriller is
a subgenre which seems to have proliferated significantly since the 90’s,
perhaps inaugurated by PRIMAL FEAR and certainly catalyzed by THE SIXTH SENSE,
but finding its most devoted acolytes in the indie boom of the 90’s and more
recently the indie horror boom of the last decade or so. For two
distinct waves --ebbing somewhat in the dour mid ‘noughts-- it often seemed,
and still seems, that mindfuck twists have been the expected standard more
often than they’ve been the shocking exception.
A mindfuck, of course,
is more than just a surprise, and more than just a twist; it’s a twist which
radically recontextualizes everything that preceded it, alters the fundamental
meaning, and sometimes even the actual fact, of the events which led up to it.
It’s not a spoiler to tell you that our long-neglected subject of the day,
2018’s GHOST STORIES, is angling for a mindfuck; it telegraphs the fact pretty
openly, right from its first scenes. And that’s inherently and immediately
reason enough for concern, but not quite reason enough for a general
abandonment of all hope. It’s a risky gamble, but also a potentially rewarding
one. Successfully executed, a good mindfuck can throw viewers into a perfectly
beautiful chaos, upending reality and forcing a sudden and elemental
reevaluation of every assumption made so far, sifting for hidden layers of
meaning. At its best, it is a kind of primal creative destruction, smashing
apart a narrative so an audience can rebuild something more complex from the
pieces. But it carries a high risk: a mindfuck which fails to justify itself
can simply leave an audience sitting in the shattered ruins of a wrecked
narrative, resenting the person who broke it.
It
is, then, one of the most potent narrative tools available, and consequently
requires a supreme mastery of storytelling to wield effectively; it requires,
in essence, no less than the complete creation of two completely self-contained
parallel narratives, both comprised mostly of the same pieces but independently
able to produce radically variant results, and both of which independently read
as satisfying drama. No easy task in itself, but made vastly more difficult by
an increasingly savvy audience, watchful for any hint of such trickery, and for
whom the film's drama will be irrecoverably hobbled if they get ahead of the
plot. Surprise, is, after all, a vital part of this formula; an audience that
sees the trick coming is, I think inevitably, an audience which is waiting for
the movie to catch up. But surprise alone is not enough; to pull the trick off
--which is to say, to invest your entire raison d'être in a sudden and radical
“twist” which fundamentally shifts the viewers’ understanding of what they’ve
seen -- you need tightly crafted storytelling and a genuinely intriguing
concept.
 |
| Gosh does this poster resemble but remain legally distinct from that other Martin Freeman-starring genre hyrbid SHAUN OF THE DEAD! I bet the guys who made this were really kicking themselves when they realized they'd made such an embarrassing blunder! |
GHOST
STORIES, frankly put, does not have an intriguing concept. There’s not a frame
of the movie which isn’t derivative to the point of parody, and its brazen
denouement, in particular, is more likely to inspire groans than shrieks.
That’s a problem, because as a unabashed and enthusiastic mindfuck, it’s absolutely
a movie which lives and dies by its ability to stick the landing. It is, in
fact, exactly the sort of movie we’ve been so enjoyably discussing the in
abstract for 1400 words now; one which gambles its entire existence on its
ability to pull off a particular magic trick. And in this case, that magic
trick, once revealed, is such a corny old chestnut that you can barely help but
laugh at the absurdity of the seriousness with which it is executed. It’s as
though a fierce-eyed stage magician drenched in blood and covered in occult
tattoos emerged from a pit of fire, dramatically shouted incantations summoning
the blackest demons of hell, and then pulled out a peanut can with a coiled
snake in it.
But
it is executed with seriousness, and quite a bit of care, as well. Which
brings me back around to my original question: is it this movie’s fault that
I’ve seen this exact movie before? Can a mindfuck still be worthwhile once
experience has rendered my mind essentially unfuckable, or at the very least
utterly impervious the the kind of low-imagination fuckery which is employed
here? Should a work of art be judged solely upon the sturdiness of its
execution, or are we permitted --perhaps even required?-- to consider its
content against our awareness of the vast panoply of its brethren? Judged on
one standard, GHOST STORIES is deserving of a modest admiration. Judged against
the other, it’s very possibly a disaster, if not an actual insult.
While
we consider that question, however, let us first explore what GHOST STORIES
indisputably is. It commences in the childhood memories --by which I
mean the 8mm footage, which is apparently just what memories look like on film
now****-- of Professor Philip Goodman (Andy Nyman, a busy actor in Peaky
Blinders, DEATH AT A FUNERAL, BLACK DEATH,
and serving triple duty as co-director and co-writer here, adapting his work
from the successful stage play of the same name). Goodman is ostensibly a professor by title, but TV
star by trade, as he serves as creator and protagonist of the paranormal
debunking show Psychic Cheats, and is introduced to us pulling off an
exact recreation of James Randi’s famous expose of charlatan faith-healer Peter
Popoff.***** Despite (or, the movie insinuates, more likely because of)
his strict Jewish upbringing, Goodman is a militant atheist skeptic (and
apparently so insulated in that mindset that he’ll later be confused and
visibly annoyed when a priest insinuates that there might be some kind of
afterlife), which in real life is arguably a sane, logical worldview, but in
horror movies is inevitably a sign that he’s a close-minded husbrisical
fool who needs to be taught a lesson in humility.
 |
| If that were true, pal, I'd be watching a better movie right now. |
This
lesson will be administered in the form of three interviews with different
characters who claim to have experienced paranormal phenomenon, cases pushed
upon him by a hostile former mentor who dares him to try and explain them. This
neatly divides the movie into something of a portmanteau, albeit one where the
individual segments are not exactly self-contained stories in themselves so
much as little clues to a larger puzzle masquerading as separate incidents.
(This is, again, hardly a spoiler, as the movie is unabashedly unsubtle about
the repeated motifs it drops with a thud [or, more often, a loud musical sting]
in front of the audience’s face over and over, lingering almost
pornographically over them until they become impossible to miss, even absent any
context for them). In the first, Goodman interviews a former nightwatchman
(Paul Whitehouse, “Gentleman Drunk” in BURKE AND HARE, absolutely terrific
here) who spends a scary night wandering around the poorly-lit halls of an
abandoned mental hospital. Next, he interviews a young man (Alex Lawther, Black
Mirror, overacting so hard it’s physically exhausting just to watch) who
recounts a demonic encounter while driving. And finally, a posh banker (Martin
Freeman, every movie) who encounters a poltergeist while his wife is at the
hospital giving birth to his child.
The
movie begins worrisomely flat-footed, with some very awkward talking to the
camera in the context of a painfully unconvincing “documentary” Goodman is
making (a conceit which is rapidly abandoned) and also some unmotivated
narration over freeze-frames, immediately and unnecessarily muddying the water
of the film’s basic perspective. Thankfully, this turns out to be merely early
jitters from first-time full-length writer-directors Nyman and Jeremy Dyson
(best known as part of the comedy troupe the League of Gentlemen) and
the film quickly settles into a much more simple and elegant style, aided to a
degree which would be almost impossible to overstate by cinematographer Ole
Bratt Birkeland (prolific TV work, including The Missing and The
Crown) who imbues the film with a splendidly oppressive gritty surrealism
that somehow emphasizes both the broken-down plainness of the surroundings and
the omnipresent otherworldliness hovering (mostly) unseen just beyond our
ability to perceive it.
 |
| This part of the movie is virtually identical to the 2013 micro-budget HEAD TRAUMA, which was also bad and derivative. Spoilers, if you've seen HEAD TRAUMA, I guess? |
For
a while, this works quite pleasingly indeed, drawing strength from an unhurried
but steady pace and some stridently solid filmmaking fundamentals. The first
and third interviews are textbook perfect specimens of patient, tightly
controlled suspense scenes, perfectly evoking the universally relatable
experience of apprehensively wandering through a quiet, empty building with
boogeymen lurking in every shadow and beneath every squeaking floorboard. The
second segment confusingly swerves into some kind of broad, borderline-comic
EVIL DEAD tone (including an unmistakable steadicam run through the woods, just
in case there was any doubt), but not entirely without success. There’s not a
single beat in any of these which isn’t a screaming cliche, of course, but that
doesn’t mean they’re not well executed, or even that they’re not effective.
Sure, it feels cheap and lazy by this point in history to pull out the old gag
where a ghost which was not previously visible suddenly and impossibly appears
behind you accompanied by a loud musical sting, but you still can’t argue with
its utility.
Even
so, some of it doesn’t quite click. The acting is mostly pretty good
--Whitehouse is flat-out terrific, and Freeman does a perfectly serviceable job
with his stunt casting as one of those overtly-friendly Europeans who threatens
you in a cheery voice while wearing a really nice suit. Lawther seems to be
acting in some completely different, much wackier movie, but it’s to generally
strong effect, and isolating him in a single segment at least makes the
competing tone feel separate and distinct, rather than utterly out of place.
Unfortunately, Nyman himself is the weak link here. He’s not a bad actor by any
measure, but his mopey doormat of a character makes for a maddeningly passive
protagonist, and the movie, even punctuated by its three marquee flashbacks,
unmistakably posits him as such. There are arguably thematic reasons for him to
be such a weenie, but anchoring the film to this offhandedly irritating sadsack
who is doomed to be emasculated and easily humiliated by everyone he encounters
until he’s simply impossible to root for… well, it makes for a slog of a
journey. Everyone loves an underdog, but no one roots for a born loser, and
that’s what his character amounts to, simply offering no reason for us to
identify with him.
 |
| I mean, look at this fuckin' asshole, here. |
I think it was a mistake
from the start for director Nyman to play this character; had he cast another
actor, simple vanity on that actor’s part might have inspired them to push for
just a little more resolve and dignity. But Nyman, free to direct himself,
approaches the role with a destabilizing black hole of anti-charismatic
self-loathing, and there’s never a frame where he’s not being dominated by
another actor (or just the scenery). One gets the sense that, as a writer and
director, Nyman doesn’t like this character, and his contempt for
Goodman’s smug facade (masking desperate insecurity) all but drips off the
screen. In fact, given his role as writer and the intense, personal way
in which the film despises its protagonist, one is tempted to speculate this
must come from a personal place-- a portrait of someone he really has a
deep-seated anger towards, or, perhaps more intriguingly, a autobiographical
portrait of tremendous self-hatred.
There’s a sort of
boldness, I suppose, to making a film which is so thoroughly contemptuous of
its central character. And it is, I think, intended as a generous
performance, the performance a director gives when he’s acting in his own movie
and self-consciously trying not to showboat and steal the stage from his fellow
actors. But there’s no escaping from his centrality to all this, and the part
desperately needed someone with a little less whipped-dog acquiescence if it
had any hope of capturing our sympathy for this man.
(This also, incidentally,
turns the film’s ostensible conflict of skepticism versus belief into a
distressingly fixed fight; Goodman fails to put up even the feeblest defense of
reason, and since the movie never fails to humiliate him and show him up as a
vain, insecure phony, it ends up [probably inadvertently?] being one of the
most casually dismissive films about atheism this side of GOD’S NOT DEAD. I’m
not certain this is the movie’s intent; absent any reason to believe
Dyson or Nyman are militant believers with an ax to grind against skeptics, I
think it’s more likely this is intended as a study of this specific
character--and possibly even an unflinching self-critique by a couple of
avowed atheists-- not a comment on skepticism more broadly. Nevertheless, the
film’s structure stubbornly drags the subject of scientific skepticism into the
spotlight again and again -- it begins with Goodman’s unhappy, strictly
religious childhood, segues into his professional pride in exposing frauds, and
posits its three segments explicitly as “unexplainable” cases which he is
goaded into investigating as a proxy for justifying his life’s work. The
subject’s centrality to the movie makes it very difficult to wave away as a
mere plot device, but the movie has absolutely no interest in an honest
discussion about it.)
Nevertheless,
the genre goods, such as they are, are certainly present and accounted for. It
certainly fits snugly into the burgeoning subgenre of low-key, all-atmosphere
low-budget indie horror flicks like IT FOLLOWS or THE WITCH, or particularly I
AM THE PRETTY THING THAT LIVES IN THE HOUSE. It has none of the imagination of
any of those, of course, but it shares with them an ambition for fanatically
slow-burn scenes of ambiguous, lingering dread. Irritatingly, though its modern
vintage is written in every frame, many reviewers (including Variety’s Guy Lodge, AV Club’s Mike D’Angelo and Newsweek’s Andrew Whalen)
seem to have latched onto its British pedigree and episodic structure to
advance the absolutely misguided idea that it’s some kind of nostalgic
throwback to the heydey of British horror, particularly citing the Amicus anthologies of the late 60s and early 70s. It’s self-evidently nothing of the kind, except
in the most mild superficial ways, serving as yet another reminder both that most mainstream critics' knowledge of horror films is often unfortunately shallow --Variety’s Lodge offhandedly cites the “Decayed Victoriana
associated with the genre” as a signal of the film's aspirations towards nostalgia, obviously forgetting that Amicus’ whole MO was
dodging the Gothic flavor of Hammer by cultivating a thoroughly modern
setting******--
Still,
I don’t consider its lack of nostalgia to be a weakness -- if anything, it
would probably be more irritating if it was trying to mine some goodwill from
half-remembered sentimentality of the good’ ol days of British horror. It seems
comfortable enough in its own shoes, mostly content to cultivate a glacially
spooky vibe, but occasionally indulging in bit of real horror red meat (even if
it is almost exclusively of the most blandly familiar variety). Indeed, if it
were only this, I could probably feel confident offering it a mild but
unambiguous recommendation.
But of course, it’s not
only offering that. It is, after all, a mindfuck, and a mindfuck is almost
never offering what it first appears to be. Which brings us back to the topic
which has taken up so much of your valuable life today, and which we have been
putting off for an absolutely unforgivable amount of time: What happens to a
perfectly fine film which insists on blowing itself up with an ill-conceived
movie-negating twist in its final minutes?
The answer, I guess, is
that it falls apart. Or rather, it deflates, leaking momentum and goodwill like
a dying balloon, until at last you’re left with a flabby, hollowed-out skin of
a narrative, every aspect still visible, but wrinkled and distorted and
diminished, lingering shamefacedly as its complete insubstantiality is nakedly
exposed. I don’t think there’s any other narrative device which has the
potential to be so completely devastating. A mindfuck isn’t just a twist, after
all, it’s a trick. It’s a bait-and-switch. It tells you what it is, and
then, once you’ve comfortably settled into that assumption, reveals that it’s
not at all what it claimed to be, that it is actually something altogether
different. So if you liked the thing it was claiming to be, you’re going to
find it rudely yanked away from you and replaced by something altogether
dissimilar and often decidedly more threadbare.
That, of course, is the
case here, and in order to go further I’m going to have to SPOILER SPOILER
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER the end of the movie.
There are a number of different mindfucks which could be employed here, and
you’ve probably already narrowed it down to three equally hacky possibilities:
he’s being gaslighted, he’s really a ghost himself, or he’s hallucinating all
this as he lies dying. You’ll notice each possibility negates the plot in a
slightly different way, but they have one thing in common: they all render most
of the runtime completely moot, even within the context of the fiction. If he’s
being gaslighted, for example, the the stories which compose the bulk of the
runtime are just arbitrary lies, and we might as well never have heard them for
all they end up meaning. That would be an infuriating enough end, but
unfortunately I’m obligated to inform you that it would be absolutely
scintillating stuff compared to what they did go with: The fucking
ending of WIZARD OF OZ. Or, the ol’ Owl Creek Bridge, to give it a name
which speaks to its antiquity.
SPOILERS CONTINUE
SPOILERS CONTINUE SPOILERS CONTINUE SPOILERS CONTINUE It seems, in fact, that
Goodman is really unconscious in a hospital bed, suffering from
locked-in-syndrome after a failed suicide attempt (so that’s why
everyone he’s been meeting has been going on at length about this obscure
medical condition!) and basically making up random, meaningless stories in his
head based very loosely on the various people who wander around his hospital
room (the janitors, doctors, nurses -- “and you were there, and you were
there!”) and then because he’s so incredibly dull, not even imagining those
stories are happening to him, but imagining that he’s some dolt being
told these stories by fictitious characters, and, I guess, visualizing the
stories that the imaginary characters in his own head are telling him in a
surprisingly cinematic way. (Yes, you read that correctly: this jackass has a
subconscious that requires a framing device for stories which occur entirely
in his own head). So, to summarize the movie … nothing happened. Nothing at
all. None of it happened and none of it meant anything. A guy in a coma or
whatever dreamed he had three conversations with fictional people where they
told him stories about a time when they slowly walked around someplace scary
and then at the end there was a jump scare (his imagination apparently provides
musical stings).
 |
| In the movie's defense, this poster is fucking fantastic. If anything like that happened in the movie, this would be a very different review indeed. |
SPOILERS CONTINUE
SPOILERS CONTINUE SPOILERS CONTINUE SPOILERS CONTINUE Now, just as a movie with
a twist isn’t inherently doomed, so too are movies which are all a
dream, or all unreliable narrator, or otherwise fictional even within the
context of the story, not inherently doomed to make you shout “oh, come on!”
at the screen and roll your eyes until your optic nerves droop out of your
eyesockets in exasperation, although admittedly that is a very real
possibility. RASHOMON, THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, and a personal favorite of
mine, CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND, for example, are all movies where much
of what we see on-screen is later revealed to be entirely fictitious, even in
the context of the story. But the difference between those movies and the single
most infuriating film of all time (SHUTTER ISLAND) is that a good
mindfuck doesn’t negate the bulk of the story which we see; it recontextualizes
it, gives the events new meaning. What you see may not be objectively true,
but the very subjectivity of it imparts a different kind of truth. RASHOMON’s
conflicting perspectives aren’t just meaningless falsehoods; they’re
stories-within-a-story designed to communicate something specific -- just
something about the storytellers, rather than the plot. We can assume that
almost nothing we see in CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND actually
“happens” -- the whole story is a lie. But through the lie we learn a great
deal about the liar, and why he would feel compelled to make up this particular
bizarre lie.
SPOILERS CONTINUE
SPOILERS CONTINUE SPOILERS CONTINUE SPOILERS CONTINUE There is something of
that in here, of course; there are little glimpses in the imagined stories
which must reflect the unconscious anxieties Goodman is feeling as he lays,
paralyzed, at death’s door, mostly having to do with his fears of death and his
guilt over a fantastically cliched incident from his childhood. But not enough.
His subconscious seems more interested in spooky atmosphere than working
through his issues, and most of the references to his own state of mind are
tertiary, glancing little things, meant to broadly hint at the existence of a
hidden meaning, rather than add any independent significance to that
meaning. Goodman keeps glimpsing the figure of a mysterious child in a coat,
for example, which will be explained when we learn that this is the central
focal point of a guilt-ridden memory lurking in his subconscious. But wait,
does foreshadowing this figure in an otherwise unrelated ghost story really
tell us anything meaningful, even in retrospect? Not really. Learning what’s
“really” going on doesn’t elucidate these incidents or add any particular
layers of meaning, it just confirms that, yes, the film has indeed been really
blatantly teasing us with a twist for the whole movie, and now here it is.
That’s basic problem; the twist is the point here. The movie is serving the
twist, not the twist the movie.
How can you tell the
difference? I propose a simple question: would this be a story worth telling
if the twist was moved to the beginning of the film? Because after all,
that’s what you’re ultimately left with: once the deception has been revealed,
the film up to that point has to stand up to scrutiny in this new light. If
knowing the truth enriches the whole experience, it could have done so, albeit
perhaps not quite so impactfully, from the get-go. If knowing the truth
cheapens the experience, well, it was probably just a lazy gimmick all along, a
petty contrivance to try and hustle you into believing a dull story was more
interesting than it really was. A successful mindfuck must have a narrative
that justifies its twist, and GHOST STORIES simply cannot make that claim; if
anything, the reveal undercuts the movie’s genuine strengths (some solid
meat-and-potatoes suspense scenes which in retrospect never happened) and
replaces them with a dismayingly rote hail mary towards some kind of
psychological surrealism. The surrealism actually works OK, but the psychology
is not even interesting on a purely superficial bullshit movie logic level
--since we already hate the character and the movie does too-- let alone on a
level of any actual meaningful insight. It’s a miserable substitute for a
finely-tuned ghost story, at any rate, and the way it firmly shrugs off any
consequential connection between the two means that it can only be a
substitute, not a compliment (in fact, it even has the audacity to turn one of
the movie’s few genuinely effective shocks into a dumb joke in the last second
before the credits roll).
I began this review by
musing about what happens when a filmgoer has seen so much that the ability to
be surprised becomes elusive, and I preceded my discussion of the movie itself
by asking how a critic ought to approach a film which features sturdy
construction, but relies on a completely predictable twist. Now, having
indulged in some 5,000 words in which to mull it over, I’m less inclined to
think that these are the right questions to ask. A good movie with a bad ending
is a good movie with a bad ending, nevermind whether or not you saw it coming.
And GHOST STORIES is only an OK movie with a bad ending. Surprise or no
surprise, this ending stinks to high heaven, and there’s not nearly enough red
meat here to warrant leniency. Even the most credulous possible viewer, even a
neophyte so unfamiliar with the basic tropes of genre fiction that this lame
WIZARD OF OZ bullshit would seem fresh, might experience a moment or two of
surprise and disorientation, but would be forced to concede upon even a
moment’s reflection that it doesn’t add up to anything. Surprise can be a
powerful tool, but that tool has to be used in the construction of something.
Far too many recent films seem to have forgotten that vital truth, and the
result is something akin to a very long shaggy dog story which peters out
without a punchline. OK, you brought us here, now what? Even if such a
film manages to actually get ahead of a viewer enough to go somewhere
unexpected --and that’s a very big if indeed-- it’s all wasted effort if that
unexpected place turns out to be dull. A minute or two of mild surprise by
itself is not a destination worthy of a 98 minute journey with so few roadside
attractions.
A much better surprise
would be to just tell a story interesting enough to stand on its own.
Fin
* Seagalogy author and national hero Vern
speculates that the basic desire to preserve the secrets of an artistic work is
not new, it’s just that as these discussions moved online it became harder to
do and consequently required more effort and focus.
** This is best summarized by Vern’s “BluesTheory of Slashers,” which proposes that certain kinds of genre films
--slashers in particular-- are, like blues songs, remarkably consistent in
their basic construction, following extremely predictable structures. The onus,
then, is on the performer -- not to reinvent the wheel, but to imprint their own
unique personality on a standard format.
***No so fast, THE FORCE AWAKENS
**** Most curiously in BABY DRIVER, wherein a
young man clearly the junior to several generations of iphones inexplicably
recalls his youth (presumably in the mid-2000’s) in washed-out silent 8mm.
***** The movie begins, in fact, with some
spectacularly unconvincing “movie-within-a-movie” footage of what appears to be
a documentary on Goodman, a conceit which seems mainly intended to allow for
some clunky addressing-the-audience-directly exposition, but also terrifyingly
threatens a found-footage premise which mercifully never materializes. Also,
you’d think charlatan faith-healers would have retired that trick after Randi
caught them at it.
****** In fact, it’s becoming increasingly clear
that many of this new generation of arthouse indie horror are being praised
lavishly by critics who have little affinity for the horror genre and
comparably shallow knowledge of its history. Reading a review of THE VVITCH,
for example, is often an exercise in watching it find praise for its fine
dramatic work, amended at the end with a grudging admission that yes, it does
have some of that tacky genre stuff at the end.
 |
| I know, I know, this one is awesome too. |
