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GHOST STORIES ****

Dir: Jeremy Dyson/Andy Nyman (15, 98 mins)

Based on their award-winning spine-chiller of a play, Derren Brown collaborator Andy Nyman and League Of Gentlemen member Jeremy Dyson turn their horror triptych into a fantastically creepy British horror. Nyman plays Professor Phillip Goodman, a debunker of the supernatural driven to expose hoaxers, thanks to his obsession with a 1970s TV personality who did much the same thing. He is contacted out of the blue by this former hero who believes he may have encountered three cases that cannot be explained. Nyman duly does so and meets Paul Whitehouse’s nightwatchman, Alex Lawther’s schoolboy and Martin Freeman’s city trader. Each has a terrible tale to tell, related in flashback which may all hold relevance to Nyman’s character himself. It’s gripping, disturbing stuff, imbued with a sense of menace; Whitehouse shines as a jumpy, potentially violent man forced to relive his past, Lawther and Freeman similarly convince as, respectively, a deranged boy troubled by his home life and a slimy anti-Semite plagued by a poltergeist. There are jump scares, but the film succeeds best in its atmosphere of growing dread. Unsettling and well staged with a great ensemble cast, Ghost Stories follows in a rich vein of British portmanteau found in the Hammer and Amicus films of the 70s. Opens Apr 6