Ghost Stories 2018

In 1979, Philip Goodman’s father, Mr Goodman, a stern and traditional man, drives his sister from the family after she begins dating an Asian man. As an adult, Goodman is a solitary but accomplished professor and television presenter whose show aims to debunk fraudulent psychics, a vocation he believes can shield people from the heartbreak his own family endured. He receives a mysterious invitation to meet the renowned 1970s paranormal investigator Charles Cameron, who inspired him as a boy but has been missing for decades and now lives in a sickly, impoverished caravan. Cameron asks him to reexamine three cases of supposedly real supernatural sightings.

The first case follows Tony Matthews, a night watchman whose wife died of cancer and who feels guilt for not visiting his daughter, who is living with locked-in syndrome. He is haunted by the specter of a young girl while working in a shuttered asylum for women. The second case shifts to a teenager, Simon Rifkind, who is deeply obsessed with occult rituals and has a fraught relationship with his parents. His car breaks down after he apparently strikes something in the woods, a moment that unsettles Goodman despite his attempts to find a rational explanation, chalking it up to neuroses and imagination.

The third case centers on a City financier, Mike Priddle, tormented by a poltergeist while awaiting the birth of his child. His wife appears to him as she dies, suggesting something unnatural about the baby to come, and soon afterward Priddle takes his own life with a shotgun. As Goodman digs into these accounts, Cameron pushes him to confront the possibility that each incident may be more than mere illusion.

Goodman’s investigation takes a shocking turn when Cameron removes his latex disguise, revealing that he is actually [Mike Priddle]. Goodman initially suspects a hoax, yet the boundaries between truth and illusion begin to blur, and the investigation spirals out of control. The two men travel back to a childhood moment in which Goodman witnessed two bullies lure a mentally disabled boy into a drain, where the boy dies from an asthma attack. The memory haunts Goodman as a living tormentor, and the apparition of the bullied boy reappears to torment him, guiding him toward a hospital bed.

The hospital scene unfolds with bone-chilling clarity. A ghoul-like figure presses down, and Goodman is drawn into a nightmarish sequence where the ghoul inserts a finger into his mouth, forcing him to relive the moment while crying, “No, not again!” The line marks a bone-deep repetition of guilt and fear that has haunted him since childhood. >“No, not again!”

In the stark contrast of the real world, Goodman lies in a hospital bed with tubes in his mouth, the victim of a suicide attempt that has left him in a state of locked-in syndrome. Every character and event he experienced during the investigation appears to be a projection born from the hospital room’s staff, objects, and atmosphere rather than independent hauntings. The medical team misreads his condition as a persistent vegetative state, with grim forecasts offered by a junior doctor who bluntly says Goodman is “here for keeps” and has no hope of recovery. As the doctors debate his fate, a cleaner moves a mirror, offering a different view of the room and a glimmer of possible awareness in Goodman’s world.

The film maintains a careful balance between probing psychological guilt and supernatural suggestion, offering a stark meditation on trauma, memory, and the way a single lifetime can accumulate haunting narratives. Throughout, the tension between belief and skepticism is rendered not as a clash of philosophies but as a personal struggle inside Goodman’s body and mind. The nameless settings—the dilapidated asylum, the claustrophobic caravan, and the sterile hospital—serve as stages where memory, guilt, and the fear of losing agency intersect, culminating in a revelation about the fragility of perception itself.