The Ghoul film review ★★★★★

Directing: it's not as easy as it looks. That much we can take away from Gareth Tunley's The Ghoul, as well as from Alice Lowe's Prevenge (which came out earlier this year). Both Tunley and Lowe are actors who have starred in a couple of Ben Wheatley films, and their directorial debuts – macabre and occult, with flashes of humour – are very Ben Wheatley-ish. But, unlike theme and style, talent can't be copied.

Chris (Tom Meeten) is a detective investigating a perplexing double murder. Two bodies have been found, having apparently continued to move around the scene after being shot multiple times. The only lead is troubled real estate agent Coulson (Rufus Jones), and Chris signs up for a few sessions with Coulson's therapist in order to learn something about him (via a sneaky peek into the shrink's notebook). After a while, though, his cover story – that he's a lonely man pretending to be a detective, rather than vice-versa – starts to seem truer than the truth.

The metaphysical conundrum and synthy score recall David Lynch, and the twist is a variation on Scorsese's Shutter Island, but Tunley's debut mostly resembles the recent City of Tiny Lights. Like that underwhelming film, The Ghoul relies heavily on a pastiche film noir plot to smuggle in its philosophical ideas, gravely overestimating the interest of both ideas and plot.

It's also sunk by some very bad acting. With the sole exception of Geoffrey McGivern as a psychotherapist, no one in The Ghoul is remotely convincing or even watchable. Perhaps Tunley, an actor himself, couldn't bring himself to cajole and bully his cast into doing their best. Perhaps that's just one aspect of being a director that's not as easy as it looks.