A Ghost Story

2017, David Lowery, USA

A quietly haunting, cerebral hit from 2017, A Ghost Story brings a sad supernaturalism to modern-day Texas, where director David Lowery sets a time-stretching tale in a house on the outskirts of town.

Lowery largely shoots the film in the weatherboarded home where married couple Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara live, hemming them in a boxy postcard-like frame and hiding Affleck under a large bed sheet with hand-cut eye holes. The wife wants to leave but the musician husband has a strange attachment to the house, whose walls seem to contain a presence beyond their current living inhabitants.  Viewers will intuit from the title that someone (Affleck’s musician) dies and hangs around, but the minimalist story that unfolds – even though lights flicker and dishes are smashed – is more subtle than either the name of the film or the primitive ghost costume. The ghost’s lonely observation of his wife and the subsequent inhabitants of the house is punctuated by moments of warmth, rage and even humour as time passes.

A Ghost Story is both a simple story and a puzzle that, like the drape of Affleck’s sheeted shoulders, conveys a lot without saying much at all. While it’s unlike any Hollywood film in recent memory, followers of East Asian cinema might call to mind the dreamy, surreal fables of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tsai Ming-Liang.

“The riveting intimacy of A Ghost Story…  acquires unexpected poignancy in its final scenes …filling in pieces of the mysterious puzzle while at the same time departing from traditional concepts of the spirit world in ways that are as spooky as they are oddly soothing.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter