And it never seems to move again, as though Williams had been singled out to witness the tragedy visited upon an unfamiliar family with no explanation as to why he should be haunted so. In James, the events of the ghostly poacher Gawdy taking his revenge on the landowner who had him hanged by stealing his child plays out, the scene recorded in the mezzotint stops changing and the work simply ends up being stashed away in a museum. The new material gives the finale a bit of a boost – if there’s a criticism of the original story (otherwise one of James‘ best) it’s that the ending is abrupt and rather anti-climactic. In the largest change to the original text, Williams discovers that he’s connected to the slow-motion doings in the mezzotint by a familial scandal and that there’s a curse on him that even destroying the print can stop. The figure eventually disappears into the house only to emerge clutching a baby. Williams becomes interested in the dull scene when it becomes clear that it’s slowly changing – his colleagues Binks ( John Hopkins), Garwood ( Robert Bathurst) and Nesbitt ( Nikesh Patel) – see further changes to the image as a ghostly figure appears to move slowly across the lawn towards the building over a period of time.

Williams ( Rory Kinnear), the curator of a museum at an unnamed university, is sent a catalogue by one of his regular art dealers asking him to pay close attention to what appears to be an unremarkable and over-priced mezzotint, a monochrome print of an old house in either Essex or Sussex (the identifying label on the reverse is torn). The Mezzotint turned out to be his best James adaptation to date and although it added enough newly minted material to upset the purists, it remains true to the – if you’ll forgive the word – spirit of the short story ( Gatiss keeps much of James‘ dialogue and actually gives us the golfing banter that James mocked and refused to relay to his readers/listeners, for example). Gatiss had been a semi-regular in British television’s Christmas schedule since his original piece The Dead Room in 2018 – The Tractate Middoth had been broadcast five years earlier but since 2018 he’s been behind Yuletide ghosts and ghouls with Martin’s Close (2019), Dracula (2020) and The Amazing Mr Blunden (2021). James‘ Martin’s Close, Mark Gatiss was back in A Ghost Story for Christmas territory with a screen version of James‘ The Mezzotint, first published in 1904 as part of his Ghost Stories of an Antiquary collection. Two years after the disappointing adaptation of M.R.

The mezzotint bbc