The Ghost

This excellent thriller from the renowned auteur Roman Polanski is a great example of how mainstream excitment should be done.
We are thrust right into the story, and we are happily left unable to understand the complexities of the names and the situations. Of course, the obviously very much based on reality characters and plot (?) could have been clunky but works here rather well, as a form of dramtic irony. We are not seeing exact take-offs of the real people, but rather at once deliberately fanciful, and cock-eyed looks at, real people.
What really impresses about this film is the look of it, the sets and the colours, the overall tone. It is the slightly washed out, slightly absurd, surreal in its closed richness/meanigfulness of the locations that gives the whole film the look of an airport departures lounge at a midsize airport. Particularly notice the look of the central house; unremittingly ugly from outside, full of extravagances and faux-natural mod cons inside. The plot itself adds to the sense of unreality; it is at once a little silly and eerily familiar. Add to that the script; clunky and novelistic at times, this adds to the sense that things aren't wuite right, all oddly 'off', somehow.
The acting is decent, Ewan Macgregor has remembered how to perform. Brosnan is half-decent, but the real standout perfomarnce is the multifaceted characterising of Olivia Williams.
As a thriller, we don't have blinding tension but we have unease and points where the action picks up to be just about exciting. At times a starnge film, it is also a thoughtful one, with spectres and the repressed returning to haunt, through the glass of modern truish to life politics.
A fine piece of work, an example for all box-office conscious works to follow in this genre.