We cling to the sentiments of unsustainable fantasy, that our life has greater meaning, that our love is eternal, and that our worth across time has purpose. I don’t suggest for a moment that any of these things aren’t exactly that while we feel them, but the reality is something much different. Life is beautiful and fleeting and for many, heavily weighted with questions. What does it mean to be alive, to be human, to be together and to travel these short few spins around the Sun?
Director David Lowery takes a stab at offering some answers in his 2017 drama A Ghost Story, a puzzler of a film that I put off for years watching, our site reviewing it on release but not making it onto my already crowded list. By chance, I stumbled upon it while doing some work on something else and knew I had to get this into my schedule. I also knew it was a decisive story but that’s about it. I hadn’t even read our review.
So, here I go, endeavoring to unwrap the tangles in my head about where it all left me. I’ll get out of the way my general opinion in case you’re wondering which side of the high fence I sit myself and say that A Ghost Story is easily one of the most profound movie experiences I’ve ever had. I hated it for how it made me feel. I loved it for how deeply it moved me. I am still confused why I yearn for more of it. And to be sure, every word of all that means this is something special. A minor masterpiece in fact.
Briefly – to get to the story – a young woman (Rooney Mara) and her husband (Casey Affleck) are at a slight impasse, he a composer not ready to move out of the small house they live in while she looks to head elsewhere. That doesn’t mean for a moment that they aren’t deeply in love, the two clearly and honestly bound to each other. Yet there is a kind of distance, a connection he has to the place that is unclear.
Then he dies.
From there, as you no doubt already know, he spends the rest of the story drifting about the home under a bedsheet with eyeholes cut out of the fabric. This might seem like the setup to a parody, but I assure you it is not. And it must be said that while Affleck is seen little in the film, it is him actually under the sheet and it’s a wonder what he does with so little to convey so much. How? How can this image of a grown man walking about in what amounts to a kid’s costume wring such imbalance in me? There are moments when the camera lingers on him, still and somber, staring into the lens, eyes buried behind ebony black, pulling from me a kind of harrowing sense of impermanence. It’s like waking from a nightmare that you thought was a dream.
What perhaps works best, and is surely what makes the film a failure for so many, is how it is not a romance, or at least hardly in the traditional sense. I wish not to spoil even a single frame of this, but while the film establishes much in the first half, there is a separation that seems to be the end of one thing and the beginning of a second phase that travels our ghost through something unexpected. That’s not to say love holds no thread to bind this story because it absolutely does, magnificently so, but instead that time and our perception of it might not be the whole truth.
While the first half is paced almost to the point of inertness, there is a sensuous intimacy to that stillness, including a pie-eating moment that has generated some infamy. I mention this extended sequence because while I can certainly understand those who may find its length and purpose nebulous, I was grounded by the same, feeling so connected to this woman and the struggle she silently endures, the pleasure (or hope thereof) in consuming something sweet in the face of great loss, only to overindulge. That Lowery doesn’t move the camera once, and refuses to cut away long, long after we believe he should forces us to share that intimacy, to be part of that sorrow. He is asking to us be with this woman and watch in silence, and by doing so, in that quiet, recall our own moment with a pie, no matter what that might be. We surely all have one.
I suspect A Ghost Story was a kind of obvious misdirection by the filmmakers, most likely enjoying the heaps of angry reviews by audiences perhaps fooled by the title, the posters, and well, decades of movies that all have the same theme about them when dealing with ghosts. This movie is not a ghost story. There are no jump scares, no shrieks, no demons, no blood and gore, no nothing that a horror fan is looking for. And yet, it is a terrifying movie for what it suggests. I sat in the dark for some time after the credits rolled and thought about my finite place in the cyclical universe and wondered who might be there with me. Waiting. Wondering. Searching. Hoping. And will I as well?