Mind games
THE GHOUL I The small movie, shot on a dime, that’s a huge brainteaser…
The Ghoul’s based on ideas that were knocking around my addled mind for years,” smiles Gareth Tunley, an actor (Sightseers, Kill List) who here proves himself an eclectic and electric writer/director with the tale of Chris (Tom Meeten), a detective who poses as a patient to investigate a perhaps murderous psychotherapist. “I knew I wanted to make a psychological thriller that draws on some of the weirder, wilder, woollier ideas I’d been influenced by – writers like Philip K. Dick and Alan Moore.”
And so we have a fractured tale set in an oppressive London, the narrative deep-diving into Chris’ tortured mind. This is the kind of low-budget, innovative headfuck movie that will appeal to fans of Shock Corridor, Eraserhead and Memento – it was so complicated to write, Tunley had to pin notes on his walls and half-feared he’d perish in his lair, “sure to be found months later surrounded by books on the occult”.
It might come as a surprise, then, that much of Tunley’s background is in comedy, and the same goes for most of the key cast: Meeten, Alice Lowe, Rufus Jones, Paul Kaye. “When you have a film that’s quite bleak and full of mind-mangling ideas, they bring lightness to it,” Tunley suggests. “Tom is known for quite wild, physical comedy, so you take that manic energy and bottle it.”
The Ghoul certainly runs the gamut of emotions, so while it’s “a film about mental health”, it’s also a thriller that buzzes with “excitement, mystery and intrigue”. Likewise, continues Tunley, “It’s about magic, the occult, maths, madness and murder, but at heart it’s a little story about unrequited love.”
Not bad for a no-budget debut that was largely shot within a stone’s lob of Tunley’s East End home. “Its success has already exceeded my wildest dreams,” he says. “I thought we’d be showing it to one person at a time but it showed at the BFI London Film Festival and has been picked up by Arrow.”
This is one nightmare in a damaged brain you’d be mad to miss.
ETA | 4 AUGUST / THE GHOUL OPENS THIS SUMMER.