welve-year-old Lizzie (Foster), a resident of a low-income Glasgow public housing project, is involved in a car wreck that kills her best friend. Lizzie herself dies for three minutes, but is revived by paramedics. While dead, she felt herself rise toward a brilliant white light, which the doctors tell her was a hallucination brought on by lack of oxygen. In the weeks that follow the accident, Lizzie is tormented by nightmares and night terrors. She and her little brother, Alex (Owen), hear strange sounds at night in their decrepit flat. Furniture seems to move on its own, and there are bad smells and sudden drafts. Lizzie's mother, Kate (Buttle), thinks that Lizzie is merely dealing with the death of her friend by acting out and playing pranks.
The sounds, drafts and inexplicable moving of furniture grow worse. While Kate is out at the local pharmacist, Lizzie and Alex face unbearably loud and terrifying crashings and thumpings and take refuge in the bathroom. When Kate returns home, she finds that the neighbors have called the police. Social services threaten to take the kids away unless Kate can provide a more stable home environment.
Not just poltergeist phenomena terrify the family. They must also deal with a sadistic, ruthless loan shark (Lord of the Rings' Boyd), who threatens to kill Lizzie unless Kate comes up with the money she owes. The haunting grows worse. Kate tries to move, but the public housing office won't let her. Desperate, Kate turns to John Fox (Connery), a local journalist who covers outré topics like UFO sightings. Fox brings in teams of "experts" to investigate the haunting. But does Fox have an ulterior motive for helping the terrified family?
A mingling of real and unreal terrors
Even if it had no hint of the supernatural, Urban Ghost Story, as the tale of desperate people on the fringe of society, would be riveting drama in the mode of Ken Loach (Sweet Sixteen) and Tony Richardson (Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner). Director Jolliffe and co-writer Jones' screenplay owes more to the U.K. "Kitchen Sink" school of drama than it does to multiplex fodder like Poltergeist. Yes, there is the terror of the poltergeist in Urban Ghost Story. But there are also the terrors of loan sharks, teen pregnancy, social service bureaucracy and drug abuse. This confluence of real and unreal terrors makes Urban Ghost Story consistency fascinating, despite moments that seem unfocused and its having perhaps one or two too many subplots.
Urban Ghost Story is one of the rare movies that deals with the emotional impact of a haunting. Lizzie and her family know more than fright. Jolliffe and Jones convincingly evoke the guilt, grief, anxiety and loss associated with the haunting, and do so in the context of the larger, non-supernatural drama that is the backbone of the film. The real and unreal blend in Urban Ghost Story as they wouldn't in a film like The Amityville Horror.
Jolliffe uses sound brilliantly in Urban Ghost Story. The film is a soundscape of creepiness. In Lizzie's 13th-floor flat, the wind can be heard howling through cracks in the windows and plaster. In any other ghost story, this would be a tired gothic motif. In Urban Ghost Story, it's a reminder of the squalor in which Lizzie and her family live. A ghost-story cliche is used to bolster the film's realism, neatly illustrating the deft collage of the supernatural and the mundane that is Urban Ghost Story.
