a-ghost-story

A Ghost Story ★★½

A Ghost Story imagines paranormal activity in a way that is simultaneously childish and garishly adroit. The ghosts in this story appear as superficial, bed sheet-covered figures with comical eye holes that peek into nothing but blackness. These figures watch not unlike the angels in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, but unlike that film, these figures are trapped into a voiceless life of knowing and watching, an eternal existence that brings no solace, only a reminder of how fleeting their former lives were to begin with. Of course, the angels in Wings of Desire never knew mortal life before their creation, so that’s probably why they were in so much more of a talkative mood. Not that David Lowery’s latest film is a hopeless one. It is melancholy, for sure, but it still celebrates – in its own, aggressively inward way – the human experience, one fraught with pain, heartbreak but also love and wonder.

The film stars Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara as a nameless married couple living in a dilapidated house in a nondescript American suburb. He’s a musician, her career is never disclosed. When he dies in a car crash just outside of their house, she stays and debates whether to stay. Before his death, she was eager to leave and he wanted to stay. Shortly after his death, though, he reemerges as the bedsheet specter watching over her as she mourns, and later acquiesced to his departure. The longer he watches, the faster time passes, until he sees past her eventual move away to the new tenants, a Hispanic single mother (Sonia Acevedo) and her two children who attempt to create their own life and memories. But like the figure’s former life, not everything stays and the house goes on to different existences to different people, before its inevitable destruction in place for a high-rise building.

Lowery’s 2013 Ain’t Them Bodies Saints also starred Mara and Affleck, and the two films also share a similar ethereal quality that places its narrative slightly between reality and a dream. It’s telling just how unhappy Lowery’s fantasy lands happen to be and A Ghost Story is a spiritual journey through a world that doesn’t value human life as much as it values individual human experiences. In the middle of the film, a middle-aged man (played by William Oldham) monologues for a good while in the center of a party about the meaningless of life, pontificating self-righteously toward the party’s much younger patrons who may still possibly have a glimmer of hope for some version of immortality, whether paranormal or intellectual. The film seems to both agree with this man in principle, but disagree with his rhetoric. A Ghost Story sees the human experience as fundamentally worth the price of meaninglessness.

Lowery directs this film with a Malick-ian flourish. There’s very little dialogue and the movie places a lot of value in long, stagnant takes that encompass Warhol-ian silence. The film is shot in a boxy aspect ratio 1:33:1, which gives the film a square-like look with rounded corners. The artfulness of the film is directly in your face, and both adds and takes away from the film in equal measure. More troubling, whether it be the ghost’s hostility toward the Hispanic single mother or the film’s short sequence of a quiet pre-American settler family murdered by Native Americans, the film has a strange motif of white displacement and white fear of their legacy being forgotten by non-white culture. That could probably be called “reading too much into it” but the film’s opaqueness begs for audience interpretation, and in that regard I feel like Lowery could have been more careful with the sociological details.

A Ghost Story, at times, is a wonderfully pretty film with a strange but effective use of unorthodox cinematography (DP: Andrew Droz Palermo) and editing (by Lowery himself). The narrative is not very consistent in its profundity. Sometimes its points are poignant and other times I felt inundated by an egregious grad student’s elementary thesis on existentialism. But there is a creativity in the storytelling here which at times makes A Ghost Story an oddly attractive film.

 

Written and Directed by David Lowery