In 1979, Phillip Goodman's strict Jewish father threw his sister out of the family for dating an Asian man. As an adult, Goodman is lonely and single; he is also a well-known professor who specializes in debunking fraudulent psychics on his TV show, and regards it as his life's work to stop people's lives being ruined by superstition the way his family's were. He receives an invitation to visit a famed 1970s paranormal investigator, Charles Cameron, who inspired him as a boy, but who has been missing for decades and is now living, sick and in poverty, in a caravan. The old man asks him to investigate three incidents of supposedly real supernatural ghost sightings.
The first case is a night watchman, Tony Matthews, whose wife has died of cancer and who feels guilty that he stopped visiting his daughter, who suffers from locked-in syndrome. He was haunted by the spirit of a young girl while working in a disused asylum for women. The second is a teenager, Simon Rifkind, who is obsessed with the occult and has a poor relationship with his parents. His car breaks down after running over the Devil in the woods. Goodman, although unsettled by the second case, believes that each of them has an obvious rational explanation: the supposed victims imagined them, based on their own neuroses. The third case is a City financier, Mike Priddle, who was plagued by a poltergeist while awaiting the birth of his child. His wife's ghost appeared to him as she died giving birth to an (it is implied) inhuman child. The financier commits suicide with a shotgun while talking to Goodman.
Goodman returns to the 1970s investigator, who tears a latex mask off of his face, revealing himself to be Priddle. Goodman now believes that he is the victim of an elaborate hoax, but at this point reality breaks down altogether. Priddle leads Goodman back in time to the scene of a childhood incident where he watched two bullies entice a mentally handicapped boy into a drain, where he died of an asthma attack. Goodman has felt guilty all his life about his failure to rescue the victim. The decaying corpse of the bullied boy appears, tormenting Goodman and eventually leading him to a hospital bed, where he forces him to lie down, lies on top of him and forces his finger into his mouth. Goodman has been begging "no, not again", implying this is a recurring event.
In the real world, Goodman is comatose in a hospital with tubes in his mouth, suffering from locked-in syndrome after a failed a suicide attempt in his car. All the characters and events Goodman has experienced were inspired by the staff and objects in the hospital room. The doctors believe, wrongly, that he has little awareness of his surroundings, and predict that he is "here for the duration", with little chance of recovery. As the senior doctor leaves the room, he says to his junior colleague "I hope his dreams are sweet".
Written and directed by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, Ghost Stories focuses on a certain Professor Goodman (portrayed by Andy Nyman himself), a man who has found some level of career fame in exposing and debunking the work of fraudulent so-called psychics.
The arrival of a mysterious package one day from a famous TV psychic investigator from Goodman's own childhood era, Charles Cameron (Leonard Byrne) - a man thought to be long dead and whose own disappearance years before had been shrouded in mystery - soon changes the course of Goodman's future work, dramatically.
It transpires that there are three ghostly mysteries that Cameron himself had wrestled with throughout his life, yet they remain unresolved to this day. It is Cameron's wish, in his old age, that Goodman should now investigate them and bring some much needed resolution to proceedings.
Armed with each of the case files, Goodman sets about tracking down the three key proponents, upon whose testimony these apparent other-worldly happenings are based.
Though somewhat shaken by his findings, Goodman's own innate scepticism leads him to believe that each of these cases can easily be explained away through the simple application of science and logic.
But sometimes it's the psychological uncertainties of our own minds that can provide the biggest clues when we seek to make sense of the seemingly inexplicable.
Dyson and Nyman's Ghost Stories works effectively for much of its duration as an apparently straight forward, slightly hammed-up spook-fest, though there is little by way of conclusions that can be garnered on face value from any of the three tales.
But alarm bells should begin to ring for the viewer when one considers that the first two tales are told from the perspective of a couple of characters who, despite ultimately finding themselves cornered by forces of evil and in apparently terminally hopeless predicaments, both still somehow manage to live to tell the tale. And it's only once the third tale reaches it's climactic 'conclusion' that events really start to take a peculiar twist, and Ghost Stories slips into an even more intriguing dimension altogether; one whose narrative slips and slides between apparently random events of varied illogic, yet one which ultimately helps to tie the film's pieces neatly and cleverly together.
There are a few passing parallels with landmark horror films of yesteryear. Elements of Poltergeist and The Blair Witch Project are apparent in places, but curiously it's a sort of tongue-in-cheek, 'hammer house' atmosphere that is most prevalent here. And although admittedly bearing little resemblance, content-wise, Roy Ward Baker's 1981 ghoulish and very British, twist-in-the-tale offering, The Monster Club, with its own lightly comical regaling of three haunting tales - is for me, somehow the film that I am most reminded of.
Certainly, within their own film, Dyson and Nyman are unafraid to administer generous doses of gallows humour in just the right places, and the casting of two chiefly comic actors in Martin Freeman and Paul Whitehouse - both of whom are excellent here - in two of the film's key roles, certainly helps with regard to this, whilst Nyman's own rather more straight portrayal of a man with an emotionally-scarred past, is equally impressive.
Whether it's to be considered a mysterious cognitive thriller or simply a ghostly shocker, either way, Ghost Stories is highly effective, lingering on in the memory the way all good cerebrally-challenging psychological horrors should.
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