Skeletons is the 2010 low-key, low-budget directorial feature debut of actor Nick Whitfield and his only film to date. Which is something of a shame, as it proves to be a delightfully idiosyncratic gem.
Skeletons stars Andrew Buckley and Ed Gaughan (who co-wrote the script with Whitfield) as Davis and Bennett, a pair of psychic exorcists who remove metaphorical skeletons from people's closets by uncovering and excising long-buried memories. Their job becomes more complicated when it transpires that Davis is glow-chasing, a proscribed past-time that means he is using the pair's own techniques to explore his own childhood memories, and when they are given the task of trying to find a missing - and possibly deceased - man, which is outside of their usual purview.
To say that Skeletons is quirky is an understatement, but it manages to avoid the falling into the trap of self-indulgent surrealism because it's funny, whimsical and quite sweet. The film is set in an English hinterland of the bizarre and eccentric, and awash with odd little touches as Davis and Bennett using pencil drawings to identify the houses that they are due to arrive at, and the pair being served dinner that consists of pasta on a bed of rice with a side of roast potatoes. Davis lives in a dilapidated boat stranded in a field near a power station; there is no stated reason for his occupation of this unusual dwelling, it is simply his home. Exactly how the process of psychic extraction works is deliberately obfuscated, but since all of the characters act as though everything makes sense, the audience is invited to think likewise and the film pivots around its own bizarre internal logic. Thus, when a psychic extraction goes wrong and Davis ends up speaking Bulgarian, the viewer might nod sagely, recalling that the Colonel - Davis and Bennett's boss - earlier warned of this and grimly notes that it is "an occupational hazard".
It's also very funny. Buckley and Gaughan give brilliantly deadpan performances as the two leads, who bicker a lot, producing many of the film's funniest lines, as they discuss such issues as Rasputin's death as they walk from job to job. Davis is often hilariously pedantic and bureaucratic, asking clients to initial full stops to show that he hasn't tampered with them in any way. Jason Isaacs is equally funny as the Colonel, the pair's boss, who calls them "mush" and "chum" and somewhat invasively checks their health, whilst Paprika Steen and Tuppence Middleton also give perfectly pitched, drily comic performances as the eccentric mother and daughter Jane and Rebecca.
Whitfield filmed Skeletons on location around Matlock Bath and Ratcliffe-on-Soar due to the sort of budgetary constraint that pays dividends by making the production look unexpectedly handsome, whilst exploiting the setting to further enhance the film's quirkiness, such as when Davis and Bennett meet the Colonel whilst - for no particularly obvious reason - strolling along the middle of a railway track. Whitefield also uses ingenious camera angles, simple camera trickery and slick editing give the film a polished look. The incidental score consists largely of music from "Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares", a compilation album of modern covers of Bulgarian folk songs, which unexpectedly works better than anyone who hasn't seen the film is likely to imagine.
With the missing man's disappearance proving to have an amusingly banal explanation and Davis and Bennett finding contentment in the company of Jane and Rebecca, Skeletons ends on a happy note for everyone except the disappointed Colonel. It's curiously uplifting, endless entertaining, and the sort of film that leaves the audience curious to know what lies in store for its characters after the story ends. This is the sort of film that almost looks designed for cult status and it deserves it; it is to be hoped that it isn't Whitfield's last.
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