Diana Martinez
Jul 28, 2017 · 2 min read

A GHOST STORY is a powerful film and an unusual film for its wide-ranging scope and ambition. It is both a small and intimate story about a couple’s experience of grief, and an epic film that takes on large topics such as life, love, and time.

Director David Lowery spoke to Vox about his own relationship with ghosts, and the existential questions that come from entertaining life beyond death: “You know, I say I don’t believe in ghosts — but that’s because I’ve never seen what we see in movies. I’ve never seen a phantom in the night. I’ve never seen an entire shelf get knocked over and all the plates shatter on the ground. But I am open to it. And I also believe that that doesn’t have to happen for those presences to be real, because I have gone into rooms that feel sad. That feel uncomfortable. And I feel there must be a reason.”

Lowery goes on, “The ideas that are implicit to ghost stories are a source of comfort when you’re thinking about losing someone or being gone from someone you love […] I don’t believe that when I’m gone I’ll be able to be the Patrick Swayze to my wife’s Demi Moore, but I do find comfort in the thought of that. And it does satisfy my ego to think that I don’t necessarily have to be gone forever, or that she doesn’t have to be gone from me if that’s what fate has in store for us.

So I think that’s why [love stories] work well in terms of ghost stories; the idea that a relationship between two people can transcend death is very meaningful. It’s very, very romantic; it’s deeply romantic. And it is a great source of comfort

[…But] I suppose inasmuch as I do feel that my desire to haunt my wife — which sounds really creepy now that I’m saying it — this movie is a recognition of the fact that I need to let go of that.”

Diana Martinez

Written by

Education Director @FilmStreams.

Film Notes

Films Currently Playing at the Ruth Sokolof Theater

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