DVDs in Review

The Ghost (Roman Polanski, 2010)

Title: The Ghost (Roman Polanski, 2010)

Release date: September 20 2010

Certificate: 15

Format: DVD, Blu-ray

RRP: £24.99 (Blu-ray)

Rating: 4.5/5

Reviewed by Dave Lancaster

‘The Ghost’ finds Roman Polanski expertly honing his craft as a filmmaker. Here he delivers a complex, but conventional, thriller finely tuned for maximum impact, but his trademark gift for creating horrific images and projecting fears and desires via heavily stylised imagery (‘The Tenant’, ‘Repulsion’, ‘What?’) is absent here. Its tension feels real.

In terms of style and tone, he’s crossing two of his greatest works – the sprawling detective-uncovers-conspiracy story of ‘Chinatown’ with the paranoia of the unknown in ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ - to weave a jigsaw narrative all the while orchestrating a sense of dread and suspense that reaches a volatile coda.

Ewan McGregor stars as a writer hired by some shady suits (below the radar cameos from Timothy Hutton and Jim Belushi) to ghost write the prime minister’s memoirs. Not much more information is given (except that the previous writer mysteriously drowned) and the ghost needs the money so he agrees.

Enter the PM – a very thinly veiled nod to Tony Blair, brilliantly played by Pierce Brosnan – and the mystery begins to unravel. He’s been having an affair with his PA (‘Sex and the City’ star Kim Kattrall) while his Lady Macbeth style wife (Olivia Williams) turns the other cheek. It’s a threesome fuelled by tension, made all the worse when the ghost writer joins in.

The prime minister is currently being branded a war criminal, his political standing has been diminished, his public appearance is shattered and he’s pushed to the limits. He’s making mistakes and the ghost goes digging where he shouldn’t to beef up the dry first draft biography. In doing so, he begins to suspect that the previous writer’s death wasn’t an accident, prompting him to follow the deceased man’s footsteps going backwards.

Under Polanski’s assured direction, this creates almost intolerable suspense, as the audience links what they know about the dead writer’s last events with what the current one doesn’t. For example, the film opens with a shot of an abandoned car on a ferry, its owner missing, presumed dead. When we see McGregor in the same car on the same ferry shot in the same style, we become anxious.

Owing more than a nod to Hitchcock, Polanski throws in his fair share of twists and red herrings. The plot is so richly structured that it welcomes additional viewings to determine fact from fiction, but what really props ‘The Ghost’ up isn’t even deciphering the real life influences and what ifs – it’s the performances.

A fantastic cast (which also includes Tom Wilkinson and Eli Wallach) populates a cast of characters we know hardly anything about and still makes them compelling. Consider that we aren’t even given McGregor’s character’s name or any back story on him – how many other films have a complete blank slate as its lynchpin but can successfully craft a huge amount of concern for his wellbeing?