A misanthropic dentist named Bertam Pincus, played by Ricky Gervais, undergoes a change of personality to become a more acceptable human being when he is rendered able to communicate with ghosts. If the plot sounds unlikely, it is, but the actual film is very entertaining, thanks to a lively screenplay, an engaging musical soundtrack and sound performances from Gervais and Téa Leoni as paleontogist Gwen, Bertram’s love interest. A non-US audience needs to ignore the anti-English message in the casting of Gervais as the grumpy recluse who finds redemption through love, and his unlikely reformation, but at least he’s not a villain, the fate of most Europeans in Hollywood movies.

That ghosts walk among us is a familiar movie concept, and the focus of interest, in a Manhatten ‘lousy’ with them, is the particular form they take and how they behave. For instance, here they appear dressed as they were when they died – cue for a nude character to cause Bertram exquisite embarrassment. Non-dead people sneeze when they walk through ghosts, a running gag driving a scene where Gervais passes through a hotel lobby while a doorman repeatedly calls out ‘Bless you!’. The reason they hang around is they waiting for their ‘release’; they have ‘unfinished business’ on earth. As they are normally unable to contact the living, Bertram, who can see and communicate with them after he ‘died’ for seven minutes during a routine procedure, is such a rare find that they seek him out in droves. Ironically, he’s also the least likely person to help them resolve their ‘issues’. A slick tuxedo-clad talker who is pushier than the rest offers to shield the unsociable dentist from their attentions – that is if Bertram persuades the dead man’s ex-wife not to marry her chief admirer, a lawyer suspected of being a cheap-skate. As Gwen is a palaeontologist obsessed with a mummy in the local museum the transfer to Bertram as love interest is not such a leap, although the process provides the main amusement in the film. How it is finally effected is the twist in the tale.

Much of the film’s appeal is incidental, like Bertram’s interaction with his surgery colleague, his attempts to evade the needy ghosts, or trying to talk to Gwen while deflecting advice from her ‘invisible’ former husband. Targets of satire include the litigation–phobic doctors who try to cover up Bertram’s operative glitch by getting him to sign a disclaimer whilst he’s anaesthetised. There is also much to irritate, mainly in the overplaying by the remorseful husband, played by Greg Kinnear. The scenes where a transformed Bertram recovers a mislaid letter or restores a lost toy, when the smiling ghosts fade as street-lamps briefly glow brighter, seem silly. However, it is Gervais’s performance that is most surprising – even more surprising than being cast as a dentist with crooked teeth – and there are times when, sitting morosely on a bench, he resembles a young Tony Hancock.