A Ghost Story

Year: 2017
Genre: Drama
Directed: David Lowery
Stars: Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, Liz Franke, Barlow Jacobs, Kenneisha Thompson, Kesha, Sonia Acevedo, Carlos Bermudez, Yasmina Gutierrez, Will Oldham, Brea Grant, Rob Zabrecky
Production: A24

A Ghost Story is a movie of questions more than it is a movie about answers. Personal questions like, how do we know when to let go of our grief? Cosmological questions like, where do we go after die? Storied questions like, does the universality of the film's message justify its slump into generics? and practical questions like, why are we staring at a seven minute uninterrupted shot of Rooney Mara eating a whole f***ing pie on the kitchen floor?

At least we weren't present for the cooking process...

I put it rather glibly and part of me wants to dismiss this movie whole cloth. It channels the meditative pacing of a Tarkovsky film but lacks the visual acuity. It blends popular motifs from high-concept sci-fi but lacks much of the showiness. It grasps for drama but feels muted under the limitations it sets for itself. Truly if you come in with the expectation that you'll see a decent "flick," you may wind up disappointing yourself.

There is however, another way to see A Ghost Story. For beyond its questions, there's a deep well of feeling feeding into its Polaroid-esque frames. Perhaps not feelings that you actively seek to experience (mourning, melancholy, apathy and fear), but they exist so authentically in this film that they slowly sink into the soul. It's story, its characters, its technique - this film wounds you to your core. Trailblazing filmmaker Maya Deren once explained she wanted to make movies that "put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately." It seems director David Lowery had the same idea.

To summarize A Ghost Story would, A: fail to capture its essence, and B: almost be beside the point. The best primer for a movie of this stripe is to meditate on a deeply emotional childhood memory or the memory of a lost loved one. For then you can put yourself in the shoes of our central couple (Mara and Affleck), one of which spends most of the movie as a mute ghost covered in a sheet with eye holes. It's an odd costuming choice to be sure, but one that works both as a simple metaphor and a call-back to times of childhood whimsy.

This in conjunction with the film's audacious editing gets us to understand that the titled ghost (and the film for that matter) perceives time differently. The film jumps and skips but never focuses on raising events but rather the imprint that is left behind. Dream logic prevails, but never to confuse or subvert. It rather gives a strange kind of comfort to the fears that lay dormant in the mind; that of the unknown unknown.

(Shutter)

A Ghost Story is a singular experience. The one shortcoming I winced at, may well be your favorite moment (or maybe the only good moment) in a movie that is as audacious as it is unassuming. I'm not going to claim I fully understand it. But I cannot deny that the feeling of it is constant and arguably eternal.

Final Grade: B-