Casey plays a ghost – complete with sheet!
If the title alone of A Ghost Story (12A) HH doesn’t convey a sense of impending doom, then the long, lingering camera shots and over-conspicuous sound design of the film’s opening certainly do. Something nasty is about to happen to the modestly happy couple known only as ‘M’ (Rooney Mara) and ‘C’ (Casey Affleck). Sure enough, we eventually cut to an unlikely-looking car crash outside their home. C is dead.
A Ghost Story turns out to be too arty for its own commercial good.
Anyone hoping for another Truly Madly Deeply or Ghost is likely to be bitterly disappointed.
Instead, they will find Rooney Mara playing a grieving young widow and Casey Affleck playing a bloke with a sheet over his head. With two holes for the eyes. Ah, that’ll be our ghost.
Because, shortly after M identified him in the hospital morgue and went home, C rose from the trolley, still covered in a sheet, and followed. And then he just stands and watches her, for hour after hour, day after day, month after month, as she eats an entire chocolate pie at one sitting (if they ever award Oscars for best pie-eating, Mara is a cert), takes the odd shower and eventually contemplates life with someone new.
If it’s conventional horror scares you’re after, you’re much better off with Annabelle: Creation (16) a prequel to Annabelle and The Conjuring which gets a truly impressive amount of creepiness out of the origins of that scary old doll. And, yes, it does mean that we begin in the unsettling workshop of a doll-maker somewhere in the remote Mid-West. Then something very nasty happens to the doll-maker’s daughter and we know a lot more nastiness lies ahead. Especially if you open that cupboard. Most of us last saw Godzilla in the 2014 remake but the story’s origins lie in the post-Hiroshima Japan of the mid-Fifties, as a new, Japanese-made retelling of the story, Shin Godzilla (12A) reminds us. Modern audiences may feel let down by the visualisation of the monster, which seems to have stumbled out of the Fifties themselves. Until you realise that’s what it is – a contemporary tribute to the Japanese Godzillas that have gone before. The Nut Job: Nutty By Nature (PG) is the littleawaited sequel to the 2014 original. It’ll pass a rainy day, I suppose.
Matthew Bond