A QUIET, YET BRILLIANT FILM
A Ghost Story is a tender song of loss and forgetting — a comforting jewel of a film
Fear not: A Ghost Story is not a horror movie. It’s not even a ghost story in the classic sense. Like Beetlejuice, The Sixth Sense and a few others, this is a movie in which the dead guy is also the protagonist.
It’s a ghost’s story.
It is both quietly brilliant and brilliantly quiet; imagine a recent Terrence Malick film with less cinematography and more plot. A couple, identified only as C and M, played by Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, are living in a suburban bungalow in Texas.
One morning, C is killed in a traffic accident outside their home. M identifies the body in the morgue, then leaves the room. A few minutes later, in a deliberately not-scary version of an old horror trope, he rises up from the table and ambles away as well, taking the sheet with him. (This is the actual origin of the ghost-as-sheet costume; a dead person still in their burial shroud.)
C has become a ghost. But writer-director David Lowery (Pete’s Dragon) isn’t interested in the spectre’s scare factor,
which makes the movie all the more interesting; it means he doesn’t have to address the question of why death would turn an otherwise ordinary person into an evil spirit, rather than just a spirit. In fact, the film’s biggest jump-scare is when something startles the ghost.
C’s overwhelming personality trait is a quiet curiosity. He heads back to the house in which he used to live, and watches (as do we) as M eats an entire chocolate pie in one take. He notices another ghost in the window of the house next door — this one in a floral pattern; did it die in bed? — and they have a brief telepathic chat, but it’s soon clear that ghosts don’t have much to say to one another.
There was a point where A Ghost Story, in spite of being just 92 minutes long, threatened to bore me to death. But as the tale progresses, it also deepens. C becomes unstuck in time but not space, so that a subjective moment can take him forward to the house’s new owners or back to an era before it was built.
In one of these jumps, C gets in a rare bad mood and knocks some books from M’s shelf — one of them opens on Virginia Woolf ’s short story A Haunted House, which is quoted in the opening scene and well worth tracking down in its entirety.
In another, C eavesdrops on a house party in which actorfolksinger Will Oldham (Old Joy) delivers an extended monologue about loss on various time scales: your children will die; Ode to Joy may outlast even their memories, but it will someday cease; so too this Earth, and the universe that bore it.
It is painful to think of ourselves as the future dead, but A Ghost Story demands we consider it — even the weird possibility that we may be haunting ourselves.
And yet the result is an oddly comforting jewel of a film, shot in an almost-square aspect ratio, with curved corners suggesting an old TV screen. Without any real religious subtext, Lowery suggests that wisdom can be found in death, which need not be the death of wisdom.
Most ghost stories try to make us fearful that ghosts might actually exist. This one will make you want to believe in them.