Gareth Tunley (2016)

To most people, Geoff McGivern is an actor whose face will be more familiar than his name:  he’s often on television, usually in small roles (sometimes as Geoff, sometimes as Geoffrey).  It was a different matter in December 1971, when Archbishop Holgate’s Grammar School (AHGS) in York mounted a production of A Man for All Seasons.  McGivern, in his last term at the school, starred as Thomas More and starred was the word.  Anyone who’s ever been vexed by Robert Bolt’s unremitting reverence for his protagonist needs to know it’s as nothing compared to the Geoff McGivern fandom at AHGS, among the staff anyway.  He was exceptional, an all-round highflyer:  head boy; rugby first fifteen; in the same term that he was rehearsing A Man for All Seasons, he was also preparing for Oxbridge entrance and got a Cambridge exhibition.  To his schoolfellows in my year at AHGS (we were three years younger than him), McGivern was maybe most remarkable for his precocious hirsuteness.  But it was the maturity of his acting – to put it another way, the skill of his Paul Scofield impression – that dazzled the teachers most of all.  The Geoffolatry was a bit much, especially if, like me, you were a junior member of the Man for All Seasons cast.  It left a lasting impression.  It would be an overstatement to say I’ve kept a keen eye on McGivern’s professional acting career but I’ve never lost interest in him – even if nowadays this usually amounts to nothing more than calling out to Sally ‘It’s Geoff McGivern!’,  whenever he pops up on television.  Now in his mid-sixties, he’s worked very regularly – on stage and radio (the voice of Ford Prefect in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is still his best-known role) as well as on screen (132 credits on IMDB since 1979).  He hasn’t been Paul Scofield, however, and the advertisement for The Ghoul in Sight & Sound came as a surprise.  I don’t remember ever seeing Geoff McGivern’s name on a film poster before and this is the reason why I went to see the writer-director Gareth Tunley’s first feature.  (Otherwise, Tunley’s associations with Ben Wheatley would likely have been enough to put me off.)

In this psychological thriller, Chris (Tom Meeten) drives to London from northern England to assist a former colleague, Jim (Dan Renton Skinner), in investigating a double homicide.  Chris seems to be a kind of resting detective and the murder case is also unusual:  according to Jim, both victims, even though they’d been shot in the head and the chest, kept moving forward for some distance before they eventually collapsed.  The chief suspect, a man named Coulson (Rufus Jones), is currently receiving psychotherapy and Chris goes undercover, posing as a patient and visiting Helen Fisher (Niamh Cusack), Coulson’s therapist, in the hope of finding clues to the crime (by looking in a filing cabinet while she’s briefly out of the office).  Helen falls ill and refers Chris to a senior therapist, Alexander Morland (it’s Geoff McGivern!)   As The Ghoul proceeds, the boundary between the identities of Chris the detective and Chris the patient becomes blurred:  Jim, for example, has an alter ego as the partner of Chris’s ex-girlfriend Kathleen (Alice Lowe).  The direction the film takes is made virtually explicit in a brief conversation between Chris and another man at a party.  When Chris explains his mental state and that he experiences fantasies of being a detective, the other man replies, ‘How do you know it’s not the detective work that’s real?’   It’s no surprise that, at the end of The Ghoul, this question is unresolved.  By now it seems (although you can’t be sure:  the assailant wears a mask) that Chris murdered Helen Fisher and Alexander Morland, who are revealed to have been life partners as well as colleagues.  Chris escapes to drive back north but not for long.  Something happens on the motorway and he’s soon heading for London again.  The action ends as it began – Dead of Night-style – at the start of what may (or may not) be a recurring nightmare.

The film’s title, the victims’ physically impossible movement after the fatal shots and Morland’s partiality for occult paraphernalia notwithstanding, The Ghoul is a psychological conundrum rather than a supernatural horror story.   Morland encourages Chris to give his depression an identity in order to try and get a handle on it:  Chris calls his malaise ‘the ghoul’.  The artefacts on the shelves of Morland’s cluttered study include a Klein bottle, which attracts Chris’s attention and which the therapist describes as an example of ‘a non-orientable surface’, an object whose inside and outside are indistinguishable.  Morland goes on to compare the bottle with a Möbius strip, which he demonstrates to Chris, with the ouroboros (the ancient symbol of a serpent or dragon eating its own tail) and with the theory of eternal recurrence.  All of these are clearly germane to Gareth Tunley’s themes.  The Ghoul, only eighty-five minutes long and made on a ‘micro-budget’ (whatever that is), holds your attention but the supposedly confounding clash of fantasy and reality isn’t much of a contest.  Chris’s detective identity is sketchily realised compared with his depressive one, in Tunley’s script and in the lead performance:  the hangdog pallor of long-faced Tom Meeten eclipses any suggestion of a life – or job – outside the bleak stasis in which the hero is mired.  The detective work required of the viewer is, in terms of guessing what’s going to happen, pretty basic:  once Chris has been referred by Fisher to Morland and goes for psychotherapy at the latter’s home, we recognise the hallway and staircase as the crime scene that Chris was shown round at the start.

It will be clear from the above that Geoff McGivern merits his name on the poster – he has a key role and a lot to say.  His creepy bonhomie – from the word go:  Morland’s first line, opening the front door to Chris, is ‘Trousers down for half a crown!’ – brightens The Ghoul‘s prevailing existential gloom.  This is in spite of knowing, also from the word go, that Morland’s jokey-hearty manner is bound to mask something sinister and the fact that, after a while, you wonder if McGivern needs a little more vocal variety.  He is good, though – a credit to AHGS after all these years.  The former also applies to Niamh Cusack, Alice Lowe and Waen Shepherd’s music – at least in the more plangent passages Gareth Tunley uses at the beginning and end (the electro chords are too relentlessly ominous in between).  The Ghoul is, among other things, very negative publicity for London:  Tunley and his DP Benjamin Pritchard give the place a hellish look both in daylight (though the skies are always grey) and under cover of darkness.  There’s a welcoming warmth to the lights on the motorway only when Chris is travelling on the northbound side of the road.

17 August 2017