The Ghoul

Tunley confirms his mastery of macabre moods here. Now he needs a bigger budget and a broader canvas.

British writer-helmer Gareth Tunley makes an auspicious debut with this blend of Lynchian psychodrama with low-budget cop mystery.

Writer/director Gareth Tunley's moebius strip of a movie is a puzzle piece like "Memento" crossed with the satanic tone of executive producer Ben Wheatley's "Kill List" and Simon Rumley's "The Living and the Dead's" unsettling portrait of mental illness.

The British import The Ghoul is a clever, deceptively chilly example of narrative unreliability, presenting an increasingly askew perspective in a way that's somehow both off-putting and absorbing. It lingers.

Chris's depression is well drawn out, but when the film broadens into vague questions about the occult, it becomes unfocused, before finishing up with a hammy scene that undoes much of the careful characterisation that came before.

First time writer/director Gareth Tunley marshals the meagre resources of this micro-budget psychological thriller and creates a pleasingly perplexing enigma of a movie.

The Ghoul proves to be a dark, atmospheric and surprisingly moving portrayal of a crumbling psyche.

Like the oft-referenced Möbius strip, lots of empty surface, precious little feeling.

Sinuously photographed by Benjamin Pritchard, this will have your head spinning for days.

It may not withstand close scrutiny but The Ghoul provides a workout for the little grey cells and suggests Tunley is a filmmaker to watch.

The Ghoul is an occult British thriller about depression, with a bleakly poetic view of London, and a seedy sadness at its core.

The title suggests an orgy of the undead loaded with jump scares, but this is a more restrained and more disturbing proposition. The monster here is metaphorical: part depression, part manic obsession.