A tone poem of grief, love, and time, A Ghost Story is one of the more quietly ambitious films of the year. While the film rarely ever strays from the interior or surrounding areas of a small, one-story house somewhere in the suburbs of Texas, the film has a scope that encapsulates all of time and space. Whether the film truly fulfills those ambitions is another matter entirely, but you can’t fault it for effort.
A Ghost Story, now available on home video and VOD, features Casey Affleck as the titular spook. Affleck plays a struggling musician (referred to only as “C” in the credits), living with his wife (Rooney Mara as “M”) until a sudden accident rips him from the mortal coil. At the morgue, “C” suddenly sits up from the slab and wanders off, with the sheet still covering him completely (and now with a pair of black circles to represent his eyes). “C” rejects the corridor of light that appears before him and instead returns home, where “M” quietly grieves him.
And that’s, uh, that’s pretty much the movie.
Alright, fine, there’s more to it than that, but where writer-director David Lowrey (Pete’s Dragon, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) takes his premise should best be discovered by watching the film. Suffice to say, there comes a time when Mara leaves the film but Affleck’s ghost continues to linger, presiding over other occupants of the house.
The various ways Lowrey depicts Affleck’s newly unstuck-in-time nature are the most visually interesting moments in the film, and in these infrequent flashes you can see the sort of lyrical beauty that made Saints such an interesting first feature and Pete’s Dragon such an enthralling surprise. There’s a gentleness to Lowrey’s voice as a filmmaker, one that belies his subject matter of bandits, monsters, and ghosts, and at its best, A Ghost Story entices you to float through time alongside it.
But these moments are few and far between. Frequently, Lowrey instead nails his camera down to capture long, static images of his actors in the frame. Most notoriously, this is done in the (in)famous, minutes-long sequence in which Rooney Mara sits and eats pie, and if you squint you can see that she’s intermittently crying but mostly she’s just eating pie. These bits go on and on, making the film’s 90-some odd minute run time feel egregiously longer than it really is. Things loosen up in the second half once Mara exits and reality becomes more fluid, but A Ghost Story often feels like a short, experimental film that has been stretched out to feature length.
The dialogue is sparse, and when it does come it’s often in that whisper-mumble thing that is so popular among independent filmmakers these days for some fucking reason. Lowrey did something similar with Saints, a film that frustrated with its emphasis on imagery and atmosphere over story and character. A Ghost Story is sort of like devoting an entire film to that imagery and that atmosphere and letting the rest slide.
Lowrey shot the film in 1:33:1, meaning that the frame is an almost perfect square, with cropped corners that make the film feel like a sequence of pictures in an old photo album. You can feel Lowrey’s Malick influence with the interplay of light and shadow throughout the house that Affleck haunts, and the few scenes that indulge in standard ghostly antics suggest that Lowrey could easily have made a spooky little genre picture, had that been his aim.
It’s not, though. Instead, A Ghost Story uses the image of the ghost and the tropes of a haunting to examine humans’ relationships with time. Late in the game, a partygoer delivers a long, nihilistic rant about how everything is inherently meaningless because time will erase everything, the cosmos swallowing all life and art when it collapses in on itself at the end of time. The monologue is one of the few sustained sequences of dialogue in the film, and one of the sporadic moments when you can feel A Ghost Story’s pulse begin to quicken.
I don’t know that Lowrey actually has anything to say about time and death and life and love and etc., so much as he is creating a sequence of visuals on which you, the audience member, can project your own values and relationship to the cosmos. Which is totally fine, by the way! While A Ghost Story suggests that even against the tide of infinity, we cling to the finite and fragile bonds of human connection, it leaves it up to you whether this is our triumph or our tragedy.
Affleck and Mara deserve points for taking on a film so specific and so strange, with Affleck committing especially hard (that really is him under the sheet for the whole movie, apparently, give or take a few pick-up shots). There’s an unforced intimacy between the pair during the early, sheet-less, scenes, and when Mara and her grief become the focus of the film, she plays things with an eye towards the quiet moments of loneliness that mark loss. Grief is not just weeping and sobbing and carrying on, it’s an enduring feeling of hollowness, a feeling that can suddenly swallow you up even in the most benign or happy of moments. Those are the moments that seem to interest Lowrey here, and Mara certainly works hard to embody it.
And embody it she does, but no matter how well she plays these emotions, I never felt any connection to her, or her character, or any character for that matter. Which is odd, because I’m a sucker for exactly this kind of movie about exactly this kind of subject matter. But A Ghost Story struck me throughout as a cold film, reserved and removed. Lowrey shoots Affleck and Mara as props in a diorama, more interested in how they occupy a symmetrical frame than in establishing any empathetic link between actor and character and character and audience. Rooney Mara is not playing a human being in this film, she is playing “Sad,” and all the pretty compositions in the world can’t make up for that deficit where the film’s heart should be.
For a film that is consumed by the fundamental questions of what it is to be human, to be alive and to be dead, A Ghost Story often seems detached to the point of annoyance. Lowrey comes across more as lepidopterist than filmmaker, stuffing and mounting his subjects so that they may be pretty and static for all eternity.
Which is not to say that A Ghost Story is a bad film or not worth the watch. Only that I meant it when I said this is a tone poem of a movie. It’s an incomplete thought, an experiment, an exploration without a conclusion or even a thesis, really. Beautiful to look at but frustrating to dig into, A Ghost Story is more admirable than entertaining, and more a promise of what this talented director and writer might accomplish as he continues to evolve as an artist than an accomplishment in its own right.