After his Oscar win, it’s a clean sheet for ghostly Casey
EARLIER this year, Casey Affleck won an Academy Award for his performance in Manchester By The Sea, as a man paralysed by grief.
Well, here’s what Casey did next. It’s another tale of dislocating bereavement, but this time the Oscar might be a little more elusive; Affleck spends most of the film with a white sheet over his head.
He plays a man identified in the credits only as C, His wife is M (rooney Mara) and they live in a slightly shabby, singlestorey ranch-style house where things are inclined to go bump in the night. Is the house haunted?
It is soon, because after perishing in an unseen car crash, C rises from his mortuary bed as a ghost, though a cartoon notion of one, cowled by the sheet with two holes to see through. He
returns to the house and keeps fairly benign watch over his widow, only then she moves out and he gets agitated when a Spanish-speaking family takes up residence.
Slowly (nothing in this film happens quickly), it becomes clear that this ghost is destined to haunt the house for ever.
And not only indefinitely into the future but also stretching way into the past, in fact from the moment 19th-century settlers arrive and stake out their new homestead.If all this is hard to follow in print, I can’t say it’s a great deal easier on screen. Most of the U.S. reviews for writer-director David Lowery’s picture have been glowing, and there’s no doubt that it’s a daring piece of film-making, but again and again he asks for indulgence from his audience by letting his camera rest interminably on a single banal spectacle.
Most notably, we watch M gradually demolish an entire, family-sized chocolate pie that has been left for her by a sympathetic friend.
I can see that A Ghost Story is a profound exploration of grief, and not only on the part of those left behind. It suggests that the dead are also stricken at being forced to leave. Our ghost makes contact with another sheeted creature across the road, who seems even more melancholy.
It does also become clear, sort of, why Low- ery chose such a childlike representation of a ghost. But does it really make for great cinema? Not from where I was sitting.
A Ghost Story is certainly thoughtprovoking, but there is a fine line between profundity and pretentiousness, and it doesn’t always stay on the right side.
ANNABELLE: Creation is a much more straightforward venture into the spirit world, a genuinely scary horror film.
For all its haunted-house clichés — the creaky doors, the locked room, the sudden breezes, the flickering lights — I was racked with those exquisitely uncomfortable shivers pretty much throughout. The film is a prequel to Annabelle (2014), which in turn was a prequel to The Conjuring films. So while I hate to resort to glib cliches myself, it’s what you might call an origin story.
Anthony LaPaglia plays a dollmaker in Thirties America, whose beloved only daughter, Annabelle, dies in a road accident. Years later, he and his bedridden wife (Miranda Otto) open their house to six orphaned girls in the charge of a kindly nun, which is when things begin to get seriously spooky.
There is some of the usual horror-film silliness, but director David F. Sandberg has made an effective chiller, and teases fine performances from his young cast, especially Lulu Wilson as Janice, a girl crippled by polio who can’t run as fast as the others. Which, of course, is just as ominous as it sounds.