To be honest, there was a British film that managed to catch my eye recently. After reading it, take a breath! After the epiphany, I sighed at the director's skill, and the feeling of being led by the nose throughout the whole process was both wonderful and frustrating. The film is called Ghost Stories.
But after watching the whole film, in fact, there is no real "ghost" at all, there are only countless "inner demons", which are constantly cut and unreasonable. "Ghost Story" is adapted from a British stage play. The film retains a clear and identifiable "indoor" style in the scene scheduling. Many scenes that take place in the room draw on the stage play's choreography skills.
This makes the film pay more attention to the lines and details, and tests the dialogue and expressions of the characters. It makes it easier for the audience to perceive the emotional changes in the characters' hearts. The plot adopts a 3+2 structure mode, with 3 "ghost" stories as the main plot. The first act in the front acts as a foreshadowing of the character's character, ambush the motivational event, and the third act climax, as the essence of the whole film, creates a magical turning point that shocks the jaw, and directly elevates the depth of the film's theme.
Andy Nyman directed and acted by himself and played the leading role of Professor Goodman in the film. The first act tells how he cracked the so-called "psychic" people on the spot. As a scientist, he does not believe in supernatural phenomena because of rationality generation,
He believes that those so-called "ghosts" are the embodiment of what people want to see in their hearts. It is the inner demon that can be explained by psychology and treated. Beginning in the second act, he receives an invitation from his childhood enlightenment "Idol" to investigate three victims of the paranormal: the night watchman of the abandoned sanctuary;
He claimed to have seen the ghost of his dead daughter in an abandoned female mental hospital, and the scene where the female ghost stuck her finger into her mouth left the audience with the first mental "trauma".
This is just the beginning. Goodman disapproved of it, and even satirized the priest of the night watchman. The priest regarded this "encounter" as a miracle, and it was an "appearance" of the dead man's incomparable nostalgia for his relatives. The second victim was a restless young man who thought he had seen the ghost hit and killed;
The young man who habitually lied, under the constant phone calls from his parents, bumped into a bull-horned ghost in a hurry. You came and went on the wilderness car, hiding in Tibet. This is the second time the film has raised anxiety and exploded emotions. structural deception.
Goodman's rationality began to loosen, and unexplainable mysterious phenomena appeared in front of his eyes one after another. The third victim is a wealthy widower (played by Martin Freeman). Because of his career, he delayed his wife's best childbearing time. The older wife had an unfortunate birth, and both the fetus and his wife died.
He claims that on the day his wife died, he suffered a series of unexplained horrors in his home.
After the three "ghost" stories were explored, the real climax moment came to an end slowly. All the essence of "Ghost Story" remains in the climax of the third act. Goodman returns to the idol's residence and goes to confront him. He himself can't explain everything he sees, but he still insists that everything can be learned from psychology and science. be explained.
As a result, what happened next completely changed the worldview and perception of Goodman and you as an audience. If there is no "sublimation" in the last 20 minutes of "Ghost Story", and the foreshadowing is revealed, then the film is just a collection of stories, but the design of the third act takes the whole film, as the narrative backbone, the first act The residual heat of the film and the three "ghost" stories have been successfully connected in series, and together they have upgraded the viewing rate of the film, opened up brain holes, and improved the level of horror and horror. Here, in order to leave suspense, Brother Fat will no longer spoil the story, but will only throw a few clues and provide a foreshadowing trail and the structure of the story, so that everyone can pay attention when watching, that is, it will not affect the plot, and it can also deepen the understanding of those who are just a little bit. An image of key information that has passed away.
A good story is usually like this, the storyteller (director and screenwriter) pulls us into expectations, makes us think we see through everything, and then tears reality apart, creating surprise and curiosity, sending us back to the story again and again. The front part is sent. With each retrospective journey, we gain deeper and deeper insights into the character and the nature of the world. It was an epiphany to the unspeakable truth hidden beneath the cinematic image. So, character + world = truth
In the film, the design of the characters and the changes of the characters from the beginning to the end are part of the reveal of the theme; while the whole world has changed from the imagined "self-righteousness" to the "partial truth" of the final epiphany, the other half of the theme can be seen in this change. . "Ghost Story" designed the characters and stories in this way. In the film, the actor Goodman started out as an investigator, using his perspective and interviews to lay out the story, but in the third act of the turning point, we found that this investigation is just another time for Goodman to recognize his own. A journey of self-discovery. The three "ghost" stories are actually inextricably linked to Goodman himself.
The story of the night watchman can be seen as a "transplant" when he became a father in middle age. The story of a young man hitting a ghost is naturally a portrayal of his youth, while the rich widower corresponds to his life experience before becoming a father. 3 ghost stories gave the director and screenwriter enough time to lay the groundwork,
The foreshadowing is laid out layer by layer, and the third act is collectively detonated, which shakes the hearts of the audience. But when the gulf between expectations and results pushes the audience to the front of the story in search of answers, the audience can only find them when the author has prepared or ambushed these insights in advance in the work. Therefore, there is absolutely no "waste pen" in a good movie. Every frame is not wasted and has meaning or functionality.
But they have one meaning when the audience sees them for the first time, but after searching through insights, they are given a second, more important meaning. In the handling of foreshadowing and revealing, "Ghost Story" can be said to have done a very good job, full of stamina, and once the medicine comes up, it will immediately make you dizzy. In addition, "Ghost Story" actually does not have a real "ghost" in the whole film, but the use of demons as a metaphor makes the story logically confirmed.
In order to avoid censorship, domestic films have adopted schizophrenia and pretended to be ghosts to explain the appearance of illusions and ghosts in the film. "Ghost Story" can be said to provide new creative inspiration for domestic films. It turns out that "ghosts" can also be handled in this way.
Through pathology, cutting in as a patient can also create a magical scene of strange light, providing logical support for all incredible scenes and characters. In the form of dreams, the suppressed subconsciousness is presented through the means of film, which provides endless possibilities for the subject matter of the film. The important techniques of dream work are condensation and displacement, in the case of drama, symbolization and division. Symbolization refers to giving an object or a person an additional, suggestive meaning to other phenomena; it is an implication of nature, a meaningful patterning. Divide is a kind of disguise, which is achieved by dispersing or dividing different objects, things and characters; its function is to tear apart its own meaning, exclude the desired relationship, and recombine all angles , thereby rendering its own intent unrecognizable.
After the two functions are exerted, the reality and the dream of the movie are connected, and there is a channel for intertextuality. When watching "Ghost Story", all audiences are making a dream and adding an imagination. This dream and imagination are not their original dreams. However, the story and filming methods allow the audience to voluntarily participate in it, lose themselves and find them again I actually turned it into my dream as well.
"Ghost Story" is not just a "strange thing" that happened on the screen, but has become a collective presentation of the "inner demons" of all audiences, a collective subconscious presentation of universal social significance and common to all human beings. Therefore, the "ghost story" in the film actually happened to each of us, but it was symbolized and split with a cinematic narrative, realizing the concentration and transplantation of dreams and subconsciousness. "Ghost Story" gave us a daytime "nightmare" when watching the movie.
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