Ghost Stories

Ghost Stories is a 2017 British anthology horror film written and directed by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, based on their 2010 stage play of the same name. It stars Nyman reprising his role from the play, as a man devoted to debunking fraudulent psychics, who is tasked with solving three unexplained paranormal events. Paul Whitehouse, Alex Lawther and Martin Freeman co-star as the individuals who attest to the supernatural encounters. The film premiered at the London Film Festival on 5 October 2017 and was released nationwide in the United Kingdom on 6 April 2018 by Lionsgate. It received positive reviews from film critics. Plot In 1979, Philip Goodman's strict Jewish father threw his sister out of the family for dating an Asian man. As an adult, Goodman is lonely and single; he is also a well-known professor and television presenter whose show is devoted to debunking fraudulent psychics, which he regards as his life's work to stop people's lives being ruined by superstition the way his family's were. He receives an invitation to visit a famed 1970s paranormal investigator, Charles Cameron, who inspired him as a boy, but who has been missing for decades and is now living in a caravan, sick and impoverished. Cameron asks him to investigate three incidents of supposedly real supernatural ghost sightings. The first case is a night watchman, Tony Matthews, whose wife has died of cancer and who feels guilty that he stopped visiting his daughter, who suffers from locked-in syndrome. He was haunted by the spirit of a young girl while working in a disused asylum for women. The second is a teenager, Simon Rifkind, who is obsessed with the occult and has a poor relationship with his parents. His car breaks down after running over a creature in the woods. Goodman, although unsettled by the second case, believes that each of them has an obvious rational explanation: the supposed victims imagined them, based on their neuroses. The third case is a financier in the City, Mike Priddle, who was plagued by a poltergeist, while awaiting the birth of his child. His wife's ghost appeared to him as she died giving birth to an (it is implied) inhuman child. Suddenly, the financier commits suicide with a shotgun.