★★★★☆
Like our pop music, British horror is at its best when it’s stylish, resolutely un-American and teetering on the edge of sanity. Films such as The Wicker Man and Don’t Look Now are the equivalents of David Bowie and Kate Bush albums, less concerned with logic than a striking sense of disquiet. This homegrown tradition has enjoyed a revival in the past decade, with Kill List, Sightseers, Prevenge and now The Ghoul, a sweaty combination of kitchen-sink horror and hallucinatory thriller.
Bringing together much of the talent in that new wave, The Ghoul is the promising feature debut of Gareth Tunley, an actor turned writer-director who appeared in Kill List and Sightseers. One of its executive producers is Ben Wheatley, who directed those two movies and is the de facto godfather of the movement. And among the cast is Alice Lowe, the scene’s heavy-fringed poster girl.
The title suggests an orgy of the undead loaded with jump scares, but this is a more restrained and more disturbing proposition. The monster here is metaphorical: part depression, part manic obsession. The black dog at its most menacing.
“It’s Mulholland Drive with grey skies and bad teeth
Tom Meeten, a veteran of Sightseers and Prevenge, stars as Chris, the unreliable, possibly unhinged protagonist. Is he an undercover cop, pretending to be the patient of some dodgy psychotherapists while investigating an incident involving a gunman and victims who were invulnerable to bullets? Or is he a genuine patient of said therapists, unemployed, grappling with reality and struggling to get out of bed? Perhaps he’s both . . .
Meeten has the perfect face for the role, all saturnine brow, hollow eyes and mute torment. He mooches, hunched, through a stygian London; the capital hasn’t looked this oppressive since Mike Leigh’s Naked. Tunley’s film is less substantial than Leigh’s, but he creates a tangible sense of dislocation in a brief running time of 85 minutes. In this urban underworld the M1 becomes mythical, an escape route from a hell populated by wackos and doppelgängers.
Advertisement
Rufus Jones pops up as one of Chris’s smooth-talking fellow patients (or is he a suspect?), while a glint-eyed Paul Kaye holds court at a late-night gathering of conspiracy-theory freaks. And Geoffrey McGivern has great fun as one of the therapists, a gregarious occultist who immerses Chris in a world of Möbius strips, John Dee and William Blake, and almost certainly has The Wicker Man in his DVD collection.
Not that all the influences are parochial. This is Mulholland Drive with grey skies and bad teeth, and a similar concern with duality and fantasy. Like Chris, Lowe’s character, Kathleen, is a slippery so-and-so. One minute she’s a femme fatale, the next she’s a concerned mate from university.
Tunley, directing from his own script, doesn’t try too hard to explain himself — like a Möbius strip, The Ghoul is not designed to be unravelled. It’s not a perfect film; some scenes have the slightly gauche air of a student project. Yet there’s enough queasy flair here to stand comparison with many of its esoteric British predecessors.
15, 85min