A homicide detective goes undercover as a patient to investigate a psychotherapist he believes is linked to a strange double murder. As his therapy sessions continue the line between fantasy and reality begins to blur.
Writer/director Gareth Tunley's moebius strip of a movie is a puzzle piece like "Memento" crossed with the satanic tone of executive producer Ben Wheatley's "Kill List" and Simon Rumley's "The Living and the Dead's" unsettling portrait of mental illness.
First time writer/director Gareth Tunley marshals the meagre resources of this micro-budget psychological thriller and creates a pleasingly perplexing enigma of a movie.
The British import The Ghoul is a clever, deceptively chilly example of narrative unreliability, presenting an increasingly askew perspective in a way that's somehow both off-putting and absorbing. It lingers.
Chris's depression is well drawn out, but when the film broadens into vague questions about the occult, it becomes unfocused, before finishing up with a hammy scene that undoes much of the careful characterisation that came before.
The title suggests an orgy of the undead loaded with jump scares, but this is a more restrained and more disturbing proposition. The monster here is metaphorical: part depression, part manic obsession.
