Ghost stories

 For whatever reason, I always thought this'd be a classy, staid attempt at horror. I shouldn't have worried; The title card itself is cheesy as all hell and doubles as a jump scare.

 Philip Goodman (Andy Nyman) is one of those paranormal investigators who loves to expose spiritists and mediums. He starts the movie talking to the camera, explaining his methods as if we were watching his TV show, hinting at a film footage approach that soon falls by the wayside in favour of a more cinematic take. Just as well.

 Soon he's contacted by a better-known fraud exposer, one that had been somewhat notorious in the 70s, and an influential figure on Phil while he was growing up. The good doctor had vanished in mysterious circumstances, so Phil hurries to meet him.

 The old professor turns out to be an amusingly cantankerous asshole in obvious old-man makeup living in squalor in a near-derelict caravan. After implying our protagonist is a fool for being closed to the possibility of the occult, he gives him a folder with three cases he couldn't explain that - it's implied - made him lose faith in rationality. Determined to prove the old man wrong, Goodman dashes off to explain away the unexplainable.

 Yes, somewhat surprisingly it's an anthology movie. The three segments cover a night watchman (Paul Whitehouse) getting spooked in a creepy old abandoned asylum, a kid (Alex Lawther) who gets hunted by weird creatures while he drives home through a dark forest at night, and a successful financier (Martin Freeman) who is haunted by a poltergeist in his high-end flat.

 These are all 'ghost stories' rather than ghost stories - one of them does not involve ghosts at all. All of them have the simplistic structure of a campfire tale, jump scares and all: A series of events of rising spookiness, culminating in something revealing itself... and that's it, no real resolution, no real story - nothing except an attempt to get under your skin. I respect that; even if on a narrative level it's all pretty weak there's a sense of fun to the proceeds, tone and atmosphere are tightly controlled, and the scares are effective. Not to mention some truly great jokes: at one point a fake psychic, trying to convince a mark that he's talking to her dead, leukemia-afflicted son, can't think of anything better to say than 'My blood hurts, mommy!'
 A pretty cool, unselfconscious and extremely British throwback to the horror anthologies of yore, then - even if it lacks the relative sophistication of the Amicus films it seems to be modelled after, which usually managed better stories.

 Sadly, the film isn't content with all of that. Elements recur both in the stories and during the framing device - dead birds, a figure in a hoodie, a child's doll - leading up to a spectacularly terrible explanation/conclusion to Phil's story, a seriously disappointing last flourish that undoes a lot of the good work the film had been doing for a solid hour or so - even as the script seems to revel in its perceived cleverness. To be brutally clear: it's a fucking disaster. As a twist, it's valid (if a bit shit), but thematically it's completely disconnected from the rest of the movie up to it. Its particular strain of mindfuckery has been around for at least a century, and it's been thoroughly overused (and parodied) for decades in mainstream TV shows.

 The film was written and directed by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, based on their stage show; Nyman, of course, also stars as Philip Goodman, which he apparently did on the show as well. It's a shame the script's plot got away from them, because their control over tone - particularly their ability to put in a lot of humour without diluting the horror aspects - is pretty on-point. Maybe next time.