Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Cast: Rory Kinnear, Frances Barber, Robert Bathurst, John Hopkins, Nikesh Patel, Emma Cunliffe, Tommaso Di Vincenzo.

It is the embracement of life, of being thankful for what you have, and not the chance to add want to the overburdened and groaning table or under pressure waiter serving you another daily dose of charm, reality, and thought, that makes Christmas special, for in reality we see the shadows that skulk at the door, we feel the draft at our feet whilst the heart is cosy, and in that heartbeat that makes us inhale deeply, that causes a string of sweat to form on the brow, we find the night before the ‘big day’ the true meaning of being alive.

We have become detached from the thin membrane of the matter and life and what lays beyond, what was once acceptance has become avoidance, we refuse to see existence as anything except other than excess glorified as moral, and when we are faced with the mirror of mortality we deny it, we insist that it is not true, a false narrative perpetrated by the desperate for attention and those who seek to inflict a sense of misery on the world.

Those horror writers, of whatever persuasion they took, understood life arguably more keenly than those who aim to sprinkle false bonhomie and the strains of the day in modern times, they maintained the connection between the ghost story and the joy felt the next day when presents, gifts, and love were exchanged, and like the visit to the cemetery during a national holiday, it was about acknowledging what was no longer in our field of vision, of those we lost.

M.R. James was undoubtedly a master of the genre, and in The Mezzotint the sense of fear was at its most palpable, and in the timely adaption by Mark Gatiss, and following on from such fares in recent times as Martin’s Close and The Tractate Middoth, the tense illumination creeps upon the watcher carefully, with stealth, and with the sheer gaze of witnessing the subtle mental unravelling of what could be seen as an exceptional, if staid in its outlook, mind.

Whether ghosts exist or not is up for debate, for some they are products of an overactive mind, or perhaps a troubled soul, they exist in the same fantasy as monsters; and yet the unexplained phenomenon lurks at the edge of our gaze, we believe we see a shadow where there was once light, and we feel the chill of unsettling power, so why should there not be a ghost, a monster, that hunts down the soul, that makes us question our mind.

For Rory Kinnear the part of Williams is yet another reason to believe in his presence on screen, an actor who produces the truth of the profession and makes it look so beautifully easy, who can either light up a room with smile, or allows the darkness to uncomfortably inhabit the scene as if the watcher was suffering from a television encroached feeling of claustrophobia; a delight to behold, a satisfaction of perspective to be chilled by.

The Mezzotint is a case of conviction, that fear can be accelerated by the slow drip of reveal rather than the current fashion of continual unending flashpoint, and in both M.R James and Mark Gatiss, television has the ability to hold the truth of the night before Christmas with greater clarity than the falseness of the period suggests.

Ian D. Hall