A GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS - THE MEZZOTINT (2021)
Nikesh Patel, Rory Kinnear and Robert Bathurst in this fifteenth instalment of the famous BBC strand, and the eleventh based on M. R. James.
INCLUDED in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, M. R. James' The Mezzotint tells of Williams, the curator of a university art museum. He receives a nighttime country house engraving which changes each time you look at it, and one depiction shows a skeletal figure carrying a baby from the dwelling. It is surmised that vengeful poacher Gawdy has returning from the dead to kidnap and murder the infant heir of Arthur Francis, after Gawdy had been hanged for shooting a gamekeeper while on Francis' land.
Adapted and directed by Mark Gatiss, there are several changes to the source: the obligatory contemporary inclusion of females (amateur paleontologist Mrs Ambrigail (Frances Barber), housekeeper Mrs Filcher (Emma Cunniffe) and a debate on granting degrees to woman; the diversity need for Williams' colleague Nesbit to be of Indian descent (Nikesh Patel); plus Williams (Rory Kinnear)'s heritage is tied into the Francis line. This latter deviation sets up a tacked on EC comics-style conclusion, as the creature's entry to the house - contorting through a window frame and falling cloaked onto the floor - owes more than a passing nod to a Barlow entrance from Tobe Hooper's SALEM'S LOT.
The Mezzotint is the fourth Mark Gatiss entry, labeling it a "love letter" to the 1970s productions of Lawrence Gordon Clark.
Gatiss provides a tight half-hour entertainment, but treads a now over-familiar ambience. Even with the box-ticking tweaks, modern audiences cannot fully focus on James's slow-moving "world without women" in our age of instant self-gratification. The solitary academics and "things better left alone" bring an air of mystery more akin to the 1970s series, when the pre-digital age breathed a nostalgic and non streamable air. As the BFI's Dick Fiddy states about the initial broadcasts: "they went out late at night, when television wasn't a 24-hour experience, probably watched by the dying embers of the fire before the viewer turned in for the night; the nightmarish quality of the stories would linger as they went to bed. Such conditions can magnify the power of the pieces, adding to their creepiness and helping the tales imbed themselves within impressionable minds."