Director/Screenplay/Producer – Graham Skipper, Photography (colour + b&w) – Ken Whiting, Music – Van Hughes, The Deletrian Puppet Designed and Constructed by Christina Bryant, Ghost Machine Design – Janio Marrero. Production Company – The Basement Productions.
Graham Skipper (Wozzek), Christina Bennett Lind (Nellie), Paul Guyet (The Deletrian)
It is nine years after The Calamity has wiped out society. Wozzek has manages to stay alive in an isolated cabin. His wife Nellie came there with him but died four years ago. Wozzek is bereft at her loss and has built a Ghost Machine in an attempt to bring her back. The machine is successful in getting her to bodily appear for brief periods, but she only barely registers movement and can make no sound. He is hoping to improve things to be able to get her to make a full return. At the same time, an entity that calls itself The Deletrian appears at Wozzek’s door every night, telling him it wants to be his friend. Wozzek fears that it just wants to lure him outside so that it can kill him.
Graham Skipper is best known as an actor with parts in films such as Carnage Park (2016), Downrange (2017), All the Creatures Were Stirring (2018), The Leech (2022), Suitable Flesh (2023) and Never Have I Ever (2024), along with all of the films of Joe Begos, among others. He has also directed and written two previous films with Space Clown (2016) and Sequence Break (2017), both of which are genre works, and produced several of Begos’s films. In addition, he has also written a book Godzilla: The Ultimate Illustrated Guide (2022). The Lonely Man with the Ghost Machine was Skipper’s third film as director/writer.
The Lonely Man with the Ghost Machine feels like a film that was shot during Covid lockdown – Graham Skipper directs/writes and is on screen, frequently all by himself, during just about every scene in the film, and there is only one other actor present, plus another who is credited as the voice of The Deletrian. The action is contained within a single cabin not exactly in the woods but in the middle of a field. This works well where the only major failing of the film is when it comes to seeing The Deletrian and it becomes apparent that it is an awkward, immobile puppet.
The script is wilfully vague about what is going on – the collapses of society is enigmatically referred to with lines about how the sky outside turned purple, things were crashing to the ground and people were told to evacuate underground – and details are left sketchy at best. Eventually it becomes apparent that we are watching a Last Person on Earth drama. Similarly, there is little detail gone into how the Ghost Machine is meant to work – not that the film needs it – nor exactly what The Deletrian is.
I spent fully half of The Lonely Man with the Ghost Machine wondering where everything was going. However, there comes a point where things started to get interesting. Firstly, there is Graham Skipper overwhelmed at seeing the manifestations of wife Christina Bennett Lind and begging for her to fully come back to which she keeps giving not exactly straight-forward answers, giving you the impression that she is holding things back.
Skipper brings things together in interesting ways at the ending where he turns his character’s quest to bring his wife back on its head. Here [PLOT SPOILERS] Christina Bennett Lind manifests to reveal she didn’t want to come back from perfect happiness just so she could be the one who did the washing up for him and goes at length about how neglected she felt in their relationship, before a reveal about her death. This is quite well written even at the same time as it becomes an unpleasant watching experience as a male – it is an ending that falls far too much in the modern penchant for what I call Men Are Scum films – male self-apologetics, if not self-loathing, and the need to be repentant for the various shortcomings of men as a species.
Trailer here