In this moderately effective take on the question of where inspiration truly comes from in the arts, Ghostwritten comes from writer-director Thomas Matthews (Lost Holiday) and follows the travails of one-hit novelist Guy Laury (Jay Duplass), who is clinging to the goodwill generated by his first and only book while his publisher and others eagerly await whatever he has next, which is a whole lot of nothing (in the form of writer’s block). He accepts a winter residency on an isolated island where the head of his publishing company allows their writers to go and be alone with only a few local residents to distract them from time to time. Guy is flown there by a pilot (Kate Lyn Sheil) who also seems to bartend at one of the local bars in town, and the two keep running into each other in encounters that are part flirtatious, part her challenging him to try harder at life.
During the course of his stay, Guy also runs into the publishing company’s prize writer Martin (Thomas Jay Ryan), who lives on the island, and Julie (Maria Dizzia), who works at the local library and helps Guy with his research on the community’s ghost legends, since he’s convinced that the place he’s staying is haunted. Most importantly, Guy discovers a hidden manuscript under the floorboards of a room in the house where he’s staying, and not only is he tempted to pass it off as his own writing in order to placate his overlords, but also it may be a key link to a longstanding, unsolved local murder case, of which there are a few key suspects.
Shot primarily in dramatic black-and-white, with flashes of color that seem to indicate Guy’s fractured mental state, Ghostwritten is perhaps unnecessarily complicated and somewhat murky as both a mystery and an unveiling of exactly what is going on in his head, with the manuscript, and with those around him on the island. The film explores ideas about the variety of ghosts, demons, and other entities that may be living among us and feeding us details that may inspire us and make us crazy, and on that level, I found the film at its most intriguing. The deeper into Guy’s spiraling mental state we get, the less curious I got about his work and the more interested I became in the women in his life, in particular. Sheil is especially riveting here, and I wish she got more of a chance to dig into her role, instead of just popping in to keep certain mysteries afloat. It’s a compelling enough work to make me curious where it was going, and I’m certainly eager to see where the actor-turned-filmmaker goes from here, but I’ve seen better examples of the creative process run amuck.
The film is now available digitally.
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