The Ghoul - not quite David Lynch

With my girlfriend away this evening I made the most of the chance to watch a film she would be unlikely to give the time of day simply because of its title.  The Ghoul is a dark and twisted psycho-criminal drama that wants very much to be a part of David Lynch's canon.  From the recurring highway motifs to the constant shifting of motivations and perspectives, the film strives for a twisted Lynchian tone that disorientates the viewer.  This shit is hard to pull off successfully, and here is it seldom effective.

Tom Meeten plays Chris, a cop who is in London for a few days from the North to help his old forces friends solve a strange crime, a crime in which it appears victims of a shooting have carried on coming at their shooter after they should have died.  But the mystery quickly veers away from how these victims came to be, shifting jarringly on to Chris himself as he attends a psychotherapist ostensibly to inveigle into the world of the victims.  We quickly question Chris' mental health, his motivations, and even if he is a police officer at all.  Fantasy and reality bleed into one as the reality of Chris' life and the life of the persona he has taken on come together.  Eventually they are indistinguishable and we are lead on a circular path in which pretty much anything could be true.

I don't know precisely what it is that David Lynch and Shane Carruth do to make films like this that don't suck.  It is something to do with the tone, and to do with establishing a world in which the rules of that world might not be the same as the rules in our world, but they are self-consistent none-the-less.  I think that writer / director Gareth Tunley is trying to have it both ways here.  He wants a film that's completely set in the real world, but with jarring shifts of character and motivation that just sit awkwardly.  It's also very dark in places, which make it even harder to get under the skin of the main character and feel like you care what's happening to him.  Compare that to the way that Lynch lights Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive.  It's a fine effort and interesting enough to watch, but in addition to needing something to help me care more, I wanted a tiny bit more resolution at the end.  There's circular story telling, and then there's circular story telling.  This is the latter, and it's fairly unsatisfying.

Was great to see Alice Lowe in something else, shame that she's not apparently writing anything at the moment (according to IMDB).  I remain eagerly awaiting a follow-up to Prevenge.