ALSO SHOWING
A Ghost Story (12A)
It seems like every other month just now there’s an intriguing and subversive horror movie hitting cinemas. A Ghost Story is the latest, and perhaps the strangest. Written and directed by David Lowery – who broke through in 2013 with the Malick-riffing crime movie
Ain’t Them Bodies Saints before remaking family weepy Pete’s Dragon for Disney last year – it sees him making yet another left-field turn with a melancholic story about grief, told from the point of view of a ghost trapped in a single space yet unmoored in time. Essentially a metaphysical horror movie, it’s low on traditional scares but big on atmosphere, something intensified by how weird it all is. The ghost in question, for instance, looks like the cheapest Halloween costume imaginable, largely because this is exactly what it is: a guy in a white sheet with two eyeholes cut from it. Yet the person under the sheet is Casey Affleck (at least for part of the time), something that makes A
Ghost Story the most perverse use of an A-list actor since Frank placed Michael Fassbender inside a giant papier-mâché head. Affleck doesn’t start off this way. As the movie opens we’re privy to fragments of his and Rooney Mara’s slightly bohemian life together. They’re a married couple who seem deeply in love, though it’s clear from the snatches of conversation we do get that there’s some tension between them, mostly concerning their modest Texan house, to which he feels more attached than she does. When he’s killed in a traffic accident, though, he returns to their home to keep vigil over his grieving wife, his body covered in the white sheet draped over him in the morgue. The film embraces a lot of the familiar ghost story tropes here. But the decision to stick with the ghost’s perspective rather than Mara’s transforms the film into something more abstract and more cosmic. Time passes in huge swathes, new people come and go, new structures are erected and demolished, yet the ghost remains constant – a lonely soul, trapped here for eternity, unsure of its purpose as the impermanence of everything around him becomes ever more apparent. Like all ghost stories, this is a film about letting go. That this one requires audiences to let go of their own preconceptions of how a film like this should unfold is what makes it special.
Tom of Finland (18)
One might think a based-on-fact film about an underground Finnish cartoonist whose amusingly lewd drawings of butch men in leather biker gear helped define a certain gay male aesthetic in the 1970s would make for a ribald piece of cinema.
Tom of Finland, however, gives Touku “Tom” Laaksonen (Pekka Strang) the prestige biopic treatment with a fairly straight – so to speak – run through of the flashpoint moments that led to the creation of his titular nom de plume. Touku’s work was frequently dismissed as porn, but its high camp value also made it a celebratory symbol of sexual liberation, something that took on an even more important political dimension during the fearmongering of the Aids crisis. The film deals with all this in a very respectable way, but despite such formal conservatism, director Dome Karukoski deserves some credit for being true to its subject in his matter-of-fact portrayal of samesex relationships. There’s nothing coy about the film, which also feels like an honest reflection of the way the Laaksonen’s legacy has been embraced by the Finnish government as an important part of the country’s cultural heritage. ■