Customer Reviews

Omnibus {Whistle and I'll Come to You}

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Jonathan Miller, responsible of some of the best adaptations of Shakespeare's plays for the BBC Channel and of an excellent version of Lewis Carroll's " Alice in Wonderland ", put in images this fine ghost story of victorian erudite M.R. James. James was prebost of Eton's college, a renowned archaeologist and a great specialist in cathedrals' history. However his fame comes from the total of thirty-one ghost stories, part of them written during his youth as solace of his studies or as simple amusement for a Christmas reunion.

James reinvented the ghost story in his country, England, incorporating notes of fine, sometimes malicious humourism in their tales subverting with sharp irony the stereotypes of Gothic horror literature and avoiding the common pseudo-scientificist slang we usually find in the genre. Likewise, the settings where his stories takes place look for to be familiar to the reader's experiences and the horror is better suggested that shown and frequently proceed from the dailiest and most unexpected places.

" Whistle and I come to you, my lad " is, as the voice that introduces the story tell us, a horror tale about solitude and intellectual pride. A mature misanthropist professor ( a splendid Michael Hordern ), who spend his holidays in an inn in the british countryside, finds in one of his habitual loneliness outings a buried object made of metal and covered with a manuscript in an ancient cemetery. During his return to the hotel he feels as if a static figure was observing him in the deserted beach. Once in his room he try to analyze more carefully the nature of his recent discovery and decipher the content of the manuscript, which contains this enigmatic message: " Whistle and come to you ". He whistles the now identified object and nothing seems to happen, but during the night he has strange nightmares in which always appears the undefined figure of the beach. By morning one of the room-service ladies ask him about his room's other bed where seems somebody has slept, but he don't get to find an explanation about it. At night the same strange nightmares return.

The movie is narrated in a very subtle way, and the presence of horror is always ambiguously invocated. Miller, as James, leaves much to our imagination: the film moves into duality and deliberately avoid a conclusive explanation. The bizarre and enigmatic figure of the beach; the recurrent nightmares and the mysteriously removed sheets invite to us to think about the sublimations of a mind lightly perturbated by solitude, repressive and obssessive habits and his conservative points of views about life and the supernatural, but Miller leaves the window opened to a more disturbing interpretation. The suggestive better than atmospherical photography is superb and supports the subtilities of the narration.

Those who look for a more traditional ghost story or an easy entertainment will be probably dissapointed about this film. Anyway, I highly encourage everybody who ignores it to watch this, for other part, not very known treasure.

One of a large number of M.R. James adaptations that the BBC shot from the late 'sixties to the early eighties'. All of them were memorable but this is comfortably the best. Michael Hordern is the hapless academic who goes to the coast for a short holiday and accidentally awakens something unnatural while aimlessly moving around in the remains of a Templar preceptory (a subordinate house or community of the Knights Templars).

This isn't a story about a monster, though, but rather something that stays at the edge of perception. The supernatural events are alternated with the mundane day to day life at the boarding house where Hordern is staying. Everything seems commonplace but he -- and the viewer -- are troubled by the feeling that there are some things that should be left well alone. Finally, his nightmares become concrete and... Well, see the TV adaptation if you get the chance or read the short story upon which it is based.