Directed by: Jeremy Dyson
Written by: Jeremy Dyson
Starring: Andy Nyman, Martin Freeman, Alex Lawther
1 hour, 37 minutes
“The brain sees what it wants to see.”
The movie starts with a popular UK psychic on stage in front of a crowd. The whole show is an elaborate setup to prove he’s a fake (this part is based on a true story). It’s shown to all be fake, and Professor Goodman tells us that there’s no afterlife and no such thing as ghosts.
He gets a package from his inspiration, a man who spent his life proving hoaxes, but had disappeared himself. he goes to see the man, and the man gives him three cases that he couldn’t solve. The old man believes in the supernatural now, and he needs to be told that he’s wrong.
We then follow the professor as he investigates the three cases.
First: Tony Matthews, a man whose daughter is in a strange coma state. He was night watchmen in a women’s mental hospital. It’s a normal night, until it’s not; He starts seeing and hearing a little girl in the dark.
Second: Simon Rifkind is a teenager who was driving late at night without a license. He hit something in the road that looks like the devil. From there, things go downhill…
Third: Mike Priddle, a former stockbroker, and his wife were expecting a baby, but were encountering problems with the pregnancy. While his wife was staying at the hospital, he starts seeing a ghost. A very angry ghost.
And, of course, these three stories are intertwined with some drama that involves the professor’s own past.
I liked this one a lot. At no point did it drag, and every one of the four stories had something good in it. And, not surprisingly, all the stories tie together in the end. There just aren’t enough good anthology movies being made any more; it’s like they’ve mostly gone out of style, in favor of movies that often take too long to tell and stretch a story too thin. I’d much rather see a handful of short stories like this. I didn’t care for the ending or the way the stories all tie together, but the individual stories make up for this weakness.
My Rating? 7.5/10