I’ve written in this space before about my love of the Fortean Times, the long-running UK magazine of the unexplained that reads a bit like a cross between Popular Science and the Weekly World News. FT is easily the best place to turn for grounded and level-headed– but pointedly not skeptical– coverage of UFOs, cryptozoology, and various and sundry things that go bump in the night. My favorite articles, though, are the ones that dig out cases from the days of yore which have been all but forgotten: Victorian news accounts of mass sea-monster sightings, lesser-known crackpots from the “spiritualist” movement, detailed reports of self-published screeds whose print runs rarely cracked triple digits. These are the stories which fall most in line with what pioneering paranormal researcher Charles Fort termed “the damned,” data points so far off the grid that they need to be discarded if we are to make any sense of the world at all. If these things can be true, what exactly is off the table?
One of my favorite true (or at least “true”) tales of Forteana is the peculiar case of Gef, the furry poltergeist who serves as inspiration for the new film Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose. Like the haunting at its center, Fodor is a deeply silly film, and some, like many of the paranormal investigators who went to visit Gef, may decide there simply isn’t enough substance there. But if you’re a sucker for this stuff– as I’ve made it amply clear that I am– it is a cozy, cockeyed delight.
Simon Pegg stars as Fodor, a real-life Hungarian-born parapsychologist who, by the 1930s, finds himself weary of the questionable “hauntings” to which he is perpetually summoned. His curiosity is piqued, however, by a letter from his colleague Harry Price (Christopher Lloyd): the Irving family in a tiny village on the Isle of Man reports that their farmhouse is occupied by a puckish mongoose named Gef (pronounced “Jeff”) who speaks in riddles and can seemingly read minds (Gef is hear voiced by author Neil Gaiman, who may or may not have ingested helium before each line reading). Fodor is, naturally, skeptical (his eyebrows nearly shoot off his head when Price casually mentions that the Irvings’ daughter happens to be a gifted ventriloquist), but he can’t deny that there seems to be something there; the townspeople are sworn believers, and if it is a hoax he can’t quite figure out what the Irvings’ motive could be. Reasonably intrigued, Fodor sets off for the Isle of Man with his loyal secretary, Anne (Minnie Driver), to figure out what, exactly, is speaking through the Irvings’ floorboards.
The highs and lows of Nandor Fodor as a film are encapsulated in the first act, which consists almost entirely of Christopher Lloyd narrating from Price’s account of the Gef “haunting.” It is self-evident why someone would want to make a film of this incident– it is truly one of those stories too bizarre to be believed– but adapting it to the screen is deceptively difficult, as nothing much actually happened beyond a handful of people hearing a mysterious voice and maybe catching a glimpse of something furry. While writer-director Adam Sigal thankfully resists the temptation to exaggerate the proceedings into a full-bore horror movie (a la the Conjuring films), it occasionally feels as if the film is grasping at straws to sustain its narrative to feature length. Much of Pegg’s storyline is, as far as I can tell, fabricated (in real life, Fodor never actually witnessed the mongoose, and reached the conclusion that Mr. Irving suffered from a split personality), but it never quite finds the confidence to commit to the sort of madness one might expect from the premise. By the time the plot reaches its inevitable third-act crescendo, it’s hard not to feel it’s straining to pad itself beyond the one-hour BBC special which it perhaps should have been in the first place.
That being said, I am the last person to deny the pleasure of watching beloved actors like Pegg and Lloyd sink their teeth into such a paranormal deep cut, and if one approaches it as they would a Fortean Times article– as an eye-poppingly weird story to lose oneself in for an hour and a half– its charms are hard to resist. Though undoubtedly a low-budget film, Nandor Fodor looks terrific, all flickering gaslights and deep browns and greens. The actors, quite understandably, appear to be having a ball; even Driver, whose character was almost certainly created for the film, is winningly earnest in her clear-eyed optimism and unrequited love for her eccentric boss. And the film’s final moments, in which Fodor ruminates on both the Irvings’ motives for claiming to live with a loquacious weasel and his own for documenting it, cuts to the heart of what makes these stories so endlessly fascinating. The X-files of history either represent a glimpse of a world of possibilities beyond our earthbound imaginations, or humanity’s capacity for delusion, confabulation, and/or madness. In this case and so many others, it’s difficult to decide which is more interesting.
To be sure, Nandor Fodor is a slight film, and those looking for either straightforward spookery or laugh-out-loud comedy may come away disappointed. But the key here is the tone: it captures the cozy pleasures of looking for ghosts in an old English farmhouse, and the uncanny feeling of uncertainty when you can’t quite put your finger on what exactly is going on (in true Fortean fashion, the film never quite tips its hand as to whether it believes Gef is real or not, instead allowing viewers to draw their own conclusions). Nandor Fodor taps into the rich English tradition of the ghost story at Christmas, a ripping yarn which delights and intrigues in equal measure. Like its titular mongoose, it is silly and elusive, but undeniably charming.
Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose
2023
dir. Adam Sigal
96 min.
Opens in select theaters Friday, 9/1
Available digitally 9/19
