A strange and wonderful meditation on grief and the passage of time
A Ghost Story 12A cert, 92 min
Dir David Lowery Starring Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, Liz Franke, Will Oldham, Kesha Sebert
There’s an other-worldly tingle that comes with noticing how close the word spectator is to spectre. The link is the Latin verb specto – to look at, gaze on or behold – and in this strange and wonderful film from David Lowery, director of the recent live-action remake of Pete’s Dragon, the significance of that is undeniable.
A Ghost Story isn’t for children, but it doesn’t exactly qualify as horror either. Presented in the almost-square, 4:3 aspect ratio of half-remembered family film reels, it exists in an eerie cinematic in-between, and is unlike anything else you’ll see this year.
Its main character is a nameless young man played by Casey Affleck, who dies in a car accident a few feet from his doorstep about 10 minutes in. Except this dearly departed husband doesn’t actually depart. Draped in a snowy shroud, and with two doleful holes cut out at eye level, he returns home as a ghost – and silently, invisibly, watches his widow (Rooney Mara) as she falteringly resumes daily life. She eats, sleeps, grieves and reminisces, while he stands quietly in the corner, occasionally fluttering in a draught, like a piece of furniture under a dust sheet. (Of course the sheet isn’t just a sheet, but an outstandingly clever piece of costuming.)
What the ghost is going through, and what we witness as spectral spectators ourselves, is grief turned inside out – a living soul who won’t be forgotten by the dead. There’s more to the film than Affleck in a Hallowe’en costume skulking in a bungalow. But to explain exactly what would short-circuit the riveting slow-build of mystery and wonder fostered with each perfectly calibrated gesture and shot.
Suffice it to say this is a film about the flow of time, and how odd it is to imagine it will one day flow on without us. A little less than half-way through, the plot reaches a point at which any other film would draw to a logical, satisfying close – and the uneasy sense of “Well, now what?” once it passes delivers precisely the existential chill the film has been subtly driving at.
Take the early scene in which the ghost watches a woman drop off a chocolate tart as a kind of care package for his wife. She devours most of it in one sitting – which the film captures in its entirety in a pair of static long takes. Initially it’s absurd, but time keeps elapsing, mouthful follows mouthful, until you feel the accumulation of unremarkable happenings that add up to a life – the impossible heap of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, growing crumb by crumb before your eyes. It’s only in the following scene that this wave breaks, but when it does, with a swell or two of Daniel Hart’s glorious score, the effect is overpowering. It’s one of maybe five film moments so far this year that I’ll carry with me to my… well, you know what.
Even when the ghost dabbles in poltergeist activity, you can’t help taking his side. With wit and care, Lowery stages the haunting like an Eighties Spielberg film: books fly from shelves, while terrified children look on. A Ghost Story lifts some pretty fearsome metaphysical dumbbells: once we’re gone, what’s left behind? But it does so with a lucidity that means you grasp them in a blink.
It might help to think of Lowery’s film as Interstellar made on Interstellar’s sandwich budget. Without leaving the site of one suburban Texas bungalow, it takes you about as far in time and space as cinema can go.