The following review makes reference to the 2017 film Ghost Stories, and does not contain spoilers of any type.

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Year: 2017 Category: Horror. Director: Jeremy Dyson. Cast: Andy Nyman, Martin Freeman, Alex Lawther, Paul Whitehouse.

Plot

A professor who does not believe in paranormal phenomena investigates three inexplicable cases that somehow concern him: one about an abandoned psychiatric, another related to a traffic accident and one about the spirit of an unborn child.

Opinion

In the film we see the story of Phillip Goodman, from Jewish origin, who resents his religion and even more, with all forms of faith or spirituality, because his father made decisions based on his religion that affected him a lot when was young, so he becomes lonely and skeptical that spends his days denying and ridiculing fraudulent psychics until he finally receives an invitation from his personal idol, Charles Cameron, a paranormal investigator who had a great influence on Phillip's life, with the intention to visit him.

Phillip goes to the address indicated by Cameron, and discovers that he is an old lonely, sick, and lives miserably in a trailer without suitable sanitary conditions, however, decides to show respect to who considers his source of inspiration, but Cameron is rude to Phillip and criticizes his work, accusing him of being selfish and cowardly. When the conversation ends, Charles Cameron gives Phillip three files on the cases he could not resolve, and asks him to solve them.

So in the film we see Phillip investigating the cases that Charles entrusted to him, submerging us in the narration of each of the respective stories.

The direction of Jeremy Dyson was successful, maintains a correct staging, and divided the film according to the stories, I think his main defect was to jump almost directly from one story to another instead of playing more with the climate surrounding the protagonist. The script is good and the direction and performances are responsible for consolidating what is written on the paper.

The performances are good too, Andy Nyman does an acceptable job, but nothing out of the ordinary. Martin Freeman is very well, Alex Lawther plays a character personally adjusted to him, very similar to the one he did in Shut Up and Dance, third episode of season three of Black Mirror, and he does it very well. The rest do an acceptable job too.

My main disagreement towards the film, is more directed to its genre than to the film itself, this is because the horror genre has never managed to scare me, therefore, any kind of attempt to take the spectator by surprise and show horrible faces or ghosts, has no effect on me, I tend to scare more with psychological movies than with movies of this type. However, I must say that when I watch a horror movie I want it to have certain technical characteristics that allow me to enjoy the movie even though I know I'm not going to be scared, and I think this film has those characteristics, it even has a surprising twist that It is probably the most terrifying thing about the film.

Trailer

Score

7/10

Good film, technically successful, although obviously not perfect, however you can see it gladly. At the time of publishing this review, this film is available in the Netflix catalog of the UK and Canada.