Histoire de fantômes

A singularly disjointed and eccentric Murray Melvin vehicle pulling in tropes, inspirations, and homages from left and right, delightful until the last second of the closing credits. Production and costume design are something else entirely-so many questions that yield no answer. I suppose people come in for Marianne Faithful but the film is so blatantly uninterested and unaware of women the leading lady looks more like an afterthought. I wonder if this is a TV movie or people actually went out to watch it in theatre at the time of its release, as the aesthetics, the campiness, and the narrative structure are more reminiscent of TV productions yet it is not marked as one. Very seventies and yet timeless.

Pretty awful British mystery disguised as a horror film, Ghost Story pitches some poncey people into an old country house retreat and one of them starts to see spectral images that nobody else can. Directed by Stephen Weeks (I, Monster) and starring Anthony Bate, Larry Dann, Marianne Faithful, Sally Grace, Penelope Keith, Leigh Lawson and Vivian MacKerrell, what transpires for the 90 minute run time is utter boredom and bad writing.

There's too many unanswered questions hanging in the air throughout, the pace is straight out of the snail derby, and the musical score is wholly inappropriate. Faithful gives good value as a tortured soul, and Weeks shows a good turn of ingenuity for some atmospheric scenes in an Asylum, but other than that, this is a cure for insomnia and rightly it has vanished into relative obscurity. 3/10

Behind this film's uninspired title lies a really uninspired storyline: in the early 1930s, three university acquaintances convene at an old country house for a few days of hunting but one of the men discovers that the building in which they are staying is haunted. Now this well-worn plot might not have been so bad had director Stephen Weeks cranked up the tension and gone all out with the scares, but his film delivers tepid chills and zero suspense and is unlikely to unsettle all but the most lily-livered of viewers.

It doesn't help that the three central characters are such an unlikeable bunch: there's effeminate fop McFayden (Murray Melvin) who lies about the true reason for the reunion; Duller (Vivian MacKerrell), who is rude and arrogant; and wimpy Talbot (Larry Dann), who is afraid to tell the others about what he is seeing and hearing in the old house. In a series of 'visions', Talbot sees glimpses of the past, when a previous occupant of the house, Robert (Leigh Lawson), committed his own sister Sophy (Marianne Faithfull) to a nearby loony bin -- because he had incestuous feelings for her. Sophie gets her chance for revenge when the lunatics break out of the asylum and she is able to pay Robert a visit...

Ghost Story is so trite that it even resorts to that hoary old horror cliche, the creepy doll, which appears to be possessed by Sophy's spirit and ultimately kills Talbot and McFayden. Why? I haven't the foggiest, but I didn't really care -- I was just happy that the film was finally over.

Insomniacs apart, the only viewers likely to be attracted to this curiosity are fans of Marianne Faithfull. If they hope to find a forgotten gem of her career, this will disappoint them. A weak story about the haunting of an English mansion is compromised from the start because the location, which was in India, looks nothing like an English mansion. A feeble script and direction leave even such reliable hands as Penelope Keith and Anthony Bate uncertain of how to play. Followers of Marianne Faithfull will find her in ill fitting costumes and photographed from unflattering angles. The overall effect is amateur.

Three college acquaintances spend time in an old Victorian mansion. One of them starts seeing visions of events from the previous century, involving a young woman who previously lived in the house. These hallucinations seem to involve an incident where her brother committed her to an insane asylum despite nothing actually being wrong with her.

Ghost Story has a reasonably interesting cast at its disposal. It includes the ultra-camp Murray Melvin (The Devils, Barry Lyndon) as the effeminate host who invites the others to the mansion; friend of The Rolling Stones Marianne Faithful also stars in the role of the ghostly girl, while To the Manor Born's Penelope Keith also appears. But unfortunately, even with this cast there is terrible chemistry between the actors. Meaning its difficult becoming very involved in their story and it is a weak story at that. The narrative is split into two threads – the current day and the ghostly flashback – but the period story is far superior to the anaemic contemporary one. This means that when events return to the three foppish central characters the film really drags. There are admittedly some decent sequences in the ghostly section such as the scene in the asylum. But overall, there really isn't enough good material here to make this obscurity worth checking out.