‘A Ghost Story’ Finds Enough Ambitious Success to Warrant Somber Meditation

William Penix
Aug 9, 2017 · 3 min read

After It Comes at Night, and in an effort to prevent further misunderstanding between movie and audience, A24 took to Twitter to issue a little PSA about its upcoming film A Ghost Story: “#AGhostStory is not a horror movie. It’s not a ‘post-horror’ movie. It’s a cosmic love story about TIME and the enormity of our existence.” You can understand the company’s wanting to skirt additional backlash from moviegoers, but why include the message when simply showing this trailer would have sufficed?

Surely there wouldn’t be any confusion after watching that, or would some folks feel that burned by It Comes at Night’s trailers to trust A24’s advertising?

David Lowery’s A Ghost Story is yet another of this past Sundance’s celebrated indies, and is about the ghost of a young woman’s deceased partner, seeking to find meaning and freedom while stuck to the house where the two lived with one another. The film quickly falls on the footsteps of Lowery’s Pete’s Dragon remake from last year, and marks his second collaboration with leading stars Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck — the latter actor is set to appear in Lowery’s next film The Old Man and the Gun, as well.

In addition to its mostly implicit existential ruminating, the film explores the central idea and key facet to benign paranormal mythology that a spirit hangs around a particular setting because it has unfinished business, and only when that objective is met is the spirit freed. With that in mind, Lowery forgoes a traditional narrative structure in favor of a script whose looser progression poetically underscores time’s immeasurable characteristics, as well as the ultimate insignificance of our impact on time, itself. Regardless of the term ‘post-horror’s legitimacy, it certainly sounds like a terrifyingly melancholic look at the afterlife, our lives and whatever personal purpose we derive for our brief existence.

And it is; Lowery’s film wades and floats in a series of morose memories and contemplations until you realize it’s been subsisting underneath the surface the whole time, breathing its brooding tone in and out like it were second nature. It seems to take great pleasure in subverting the tropes of loss in dramas, this time mostly showing the spirit doing the grieving, but also reminding us of the fears we already had about our deaths, without doing much to comfort us about what becomes of us when we’re gone. Though, that’s actually rather smart considering any sort of philosophical pat on the back would imply steadfast certainty about what happens after we die.

The film is gorgeously shot and consists of handfuls of long takes to additionally highlight Lowery’s thematic intentions — everyone has been and will keep talking about one particular medium shot where Mara’s mourning M hastily eats pie for five minutes, while C’s ghost (Affleck) silently watches in the background. Its humble, photographic visuals, additionally emphasized by the retro-feeling, nostalgic aspect ratio, work wonders in relative silence — there’s very little dialogue in the script — and with a story that admittedly can’t resist being so evocative of Terence Malick’s catalogue. You might call it derivative, but it’s a familiar approach often saved by its looks, the actors and the beauty of the film’s storytelling.

For however tonally or philosophically slight A Ghost Story is, it’s a journey we might willfully take because it’s reflective of how we imagine our own impermanence. The film certainly makes its case clear early on in the narrative, and though it doesn’t quite have the depth you’d expect from such an ambitious project, it is populated with a number of poignantly simple moments that remind us to reshape our expectations of what a ‘ghost story’ is. Some might balk at its simplicity, but its contrastingly high goals make it worthy of our attention, and in this reviewer’s eyes, the film takes advantage of its limited resources — a $100K production budget — often enough.

If you’ve seen the film, maybe you reasonably thought it either a little too self-important or remarkably beautiful, but I’d say I’m in the middle leaning positive. Steady direction from Lowery and some wonderfully photographed scenes, among other reasons, make A Ghost Story worth watching.

Besides, where else can you watch Rooney Mara shovel down bites of pie in restrained, yet manic sadness — for a whole five minutes, no less?

3.5/5

William Penix

Written by

Creative stuff found at Pop Optiq, Screen Rant and Cut Print Film. I mostly write shit and review things. New aspirations of graduate school are on the horizon.

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