You
can definitely call this deep cover. The morose looking Chris is either an
undercover investigator feigning severe depression to investigate a pair of nefarious
shrinks or he is an emotional basket case who frequently gets lost in fantasies
of undercover police work. Frankly, viewers will be completely unable to parse
reality from fantasy and he is just as lost himself in Gareth Tunley’s
head-spinning The Ghoul (trailer here), which opens in
select markets tomorrow.
As
the film opens, Chris has no reason to doubt he is a former cop, who took the
fall for some sort of departmental scandal, but is brought back in from time to
time in an off-the-books capacity. His ex-partner Jim has such a case. A couple
fell victim to a double homicide, but from the evidence they were suspiciously
hard to kill, like junkies hopped up on PCP, except sturdier and cleaner. It
turns out the property was managed by one Coulson, a well-heeled playboy with a
history of “pushing” the impressionable to commit anti-social crimes.
Coulson
makes himself scarce, but a search of his flat reveals he has been seeing an
analyst by the name of Fisher, but she might have referred him to her mentor, Alexander
Morland. Chris will follow in Coulson’s footsteps, pretending to suffer from
long-term debilitating depression with coaching from Jim’s wife Kathleen, a
psychiatric nurse for whom he has long carried a torch. Except, Chris isn’t
really faking it that much. No matter who the real Chris is, he obviously has
trouble enjoying the little things in life. As his treatment progresses, it becomes
unclear whether the assumed persona is indeed fake or if it is part of an elaborate
fantasy life he has constructed. Of course, he too will inevitably be referred to
Morland.
The Ghoul is not merely
another Lynchian reality-problematizer. The villainy Tunley suggests could be
afoot just might be a new one on us. It is hard to explain without getting
spoilery, but it most likely involves the New Agey glyphs adorning Morland’s
office.
It
is safe to say Tunley twists are especially twisted. The stakes are also much
more considerable than the immediate is-he-or-isn’t-he question. Things get big
picture cosmic, on a small, intimate scale. This is the kind of genre picture
that is totally cool, because it throws you for a loop, but has just about zero
special effects.
As
Chris, Tom Meeten looks like the poster boy for clinical depression, regardless
of the reality he is working in. It is an exhaustingly haggard and existential
performance, but we never catch him acting. Likewise, Rufus Jones is terrific
as the flamboyant and openly manipulative Coulson, who repeatedly up-ends our
assumptions and expectations. Geoffrey McGivern goes all in chewing the scenery
like a Hammer villain as Morland, but Niamh Cusack is more ambiguously
insidious as Fisher.
