High Spirits (1988): All I Wanted Was to Be Happily Useless

Beth and Michelle return to the delightfully incoherent haunting of High Spirits, Neil Jordan’s 1988 mixture of fake ghosts, real ghosts, crumbling castles, romantic entanglements, suicidal ideation, ghostly edging, and Peter O’Toole performing every emotion as though Shakespeare might be watching. The movie offers very little logic, but an extraordinary amount of atmosphere, semi-nudity, antiquated effects, and committed overacting. Peter Plunkett stages a haunting because he believes he has failed his family, his employees, and the generations who entrusted him with the castle. Jack arrives inside a collapsing marriage and becomes attached to Mary, a ghost trapped in the same murder for two hundred years. Their connection breaks her cycle, though the film treats love, death, resurrection, and despair with the same breezy energy as a bus rolling into a lake. High Spirits passes the Castellini Test, with Mary and Sharon both essential to the plot, though the film offers virtually no diversity and very little emotional consistency. It remains an affectionate, chaotic comfort movie: part ghost story, part sex farce, part save-the-castle comedy, and entirely a product of 1988. Nothing is explored deeply, everyone falls in love immediately, and the ghosts are considerably less frightening than Steve Guttenberg’s unexpected thrusting.