There’s a particular type of psychological horror film that revolves around issues of identity. It’s an especially abstract type of horror, because it’s less about threats to the body and more about threats to our sense of self, and films of this type tend to focus on how precarious and constructed our sense of self really is, as well as how precarious our sense of the world around us is, how fickle perception can be. Films like this are thematic neighbors to crime films about cops who spend so long in deep cover that their sense of who they really are starts to disintegrate. And so today we have The Ghoul, which is a smart, moody intersection of both types of films.
We open with some shots of someone driving, watching road signs for the London M1 pass overhead, which cuts to two police officers, Chris and Jim, investigating the site of a particularly puzzling double murder. A couple were shot in their home, but as near as the forensics can suggest, it appears that even though both of them were shot multiple times in the chest and face, it took some time before they fell and bled out. In other words, both people were shot by a single intruder, and just kept walking. After being hit once, twice, three times, they just kept walking forward, and eventually the intruder fled. It’s not easy to stay upright after getting shot multiple times.
In the course of the investigation, Chris and Jim run across the property manager - a man named Coulson - who only started managing the building shortly after the murder. Something about this seems suspicious to them, and so they toss his apartment looking for clues. It’s the home of someone who seems really unbalanced, with a wall covered with notes and cryptic drawings, names and news articles and random scribblings. Coulson is seeing a psychotherapist named Helen Fisher, and Chris gets the idea - aided and abetted by his forensic psychologist friend Kathleen - to pose as a patient seeking treatment from Fisher to get access to her notes about Coulson’s sessions. If this seems howlingly unethical, if not straight-up illegal (it certainly would be in the U.S. and I can’t imagine the U.K. is much different in this regard), well, it is. Nevertheless, Chris puts together a history suggesting dysthymia and makes an appointment.
He tells Helen that his name is Chris, and that Jim is a friend who does beverage sales, and Kathleen is a girl he fancied in college but never dated.
To cope with his depression, Chris likes to fantasize that he’s a police officer in deep cover.
The central conflict here would seem to be who Chris really is - is he really a cop who’s gone so far undercover that he’s forgetting who he really is, or is he really a deeply depressed, fragile man who fantasizes that he’s a cop in order to feel better about his life? And that runs the risk of being really clichéd, but it’s not played as obviously as that story often is. Typically in a story like this, there’s a reveal, a gotcha moment where we find out that we thought he was one of these thing all along, but was actually the other. But this film really doesn’t tip its hand much at all, even at the climax it’s not crystal clear who the “real” Chris is, but the further he (and we) go down the rabbit hole, the less it seems to matter. Things start to get very weird for Chris as Fisher introduces him to another therapist, one who eschews traditional therapeutic techniques for ones involving magic and ritual. And suddenly those scribblings on Coulson’s wall start to make a kind of sense.
This film keeps a lot of balls in the air - who Chris really is, who the other people in his life really are, what’s reality and what’s fantasy, whose viewpoint can be trusted and whose cannot - and it manages it successfully because it treats all of the possibilities with a fair amount of equanimity. It’s isn’t really clear what is delusion and what isn’t. Part of how it accomplishes this is by telling the story in discrete scenes and exchanges broken up by blurry, hazy, repeated motifs, like we’re witnessing fitful lucidity, and so there’s no real emphasis on one narrative over the other for most of its running time. Issues of mental health, of depression and delusion, are treated realistically - it’s not really a violent film at all, but watching the depressed version of Chris can be really uncomfortable because his pain is so plainly evident, and it’s hard to accept that the confident police detective version of Chris might be a fantasy. But because we see the detective version of Chris and the depressed version of Chris with equal weight, without any tricky “clues” that tell us which world is real and which is delusion, the ambiguity is as disorienting as it must be to live his lives. And right alongside this narrative of uncertain, shaky identity, there’s something going on involving these two therapists, and there’s the murder from the beginning of the film. Whoever Chris really is or is not, something happened to those two people.
In addition to avoiding cliché and easy answers, this film works because it’s made with skill at every level. The acting is consistently strong and played to a human scale, largely devoid of histrionics. These are real people, with real human flaws and failings. The editing is elliptical, terse exchanges broken up by lots of shots of London at night, the London of seedy flats and graffiti-scrawled back alleys, lit fitfully by streetlamps, often blurred into washes of color. Music is largely minimal and somber, with a couple of exceptions that feel claustrophobic instead. When the action moves out into the countryside, it feels freeing, a literal and metaphorical breath of fresh air. It feels of a piece with some other English films I’ve written about here - The Canal, Possum, and Kill List, with whom it shares some personnel and stylistic DNA. It’s not as relentlessly grim as Possum or as horrifying as The Canal, in a lot of ways it reminds me of Kill List - a man way out of his depth, only realizing the extent of it when it’s far too late.
Whoever that man might be. To its credit, the film won’t tell us one way or the other throughout. There’s no reversal or reveal here, we’re told everything up front, and so the uncertainty lies with the audience, with what we decide is most likely to be true or not. Shots that at first seem like they’re intended to convey mood or atmosphere help bring things together in the final act, and offhand comments throughout take on greater significance. Nobody is who they seem to be, in ways both small and terrifyingly large - the people we’re most inclined to dismiss may very well be right, and smiling faces can hide a lot. As Sigmund Freud was reputed to have said, even the paranoid has his enemies.
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