Movie Review: A Ghost Story
“A Ghost Story” is an absurd film that is absurd in concept and in execution. Considering all of the odd and highly experimental films that have come out in the past few years, I do not make this statement lightly. Nor do I mean it with any negative connotation. Rarely have I seen a film so wholly unique and unceasingly mesmerizing. I don’t think I moved a single muscle during my first viewing of the film. “A Ghost Story” is a film relentlessly dedicated to fostering mood and fitting the perfect images, sounds and edits to clothe that mood. I would suggest anybody to go see it without having heard anything about it. It is a film that must be seen with a clean slate and a focused attention. I’m urging you, for the sake of the holy pantheon of awesome filmmaking, to stop reading this review and to go see it. If you don’t care and want more information, then read on. I will try my best not to spoil the film’s treasures, but in my eyes, everything I say is going to be a spoiler of some sort.
Paired with the film’s penchant for long takes, “A Ghost Story” burrows the same methodology of classics like Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” and Antonioni’s “L’Avventura,” which derive much of their power by asking audiences to patiently consider every second and every inch of the screen that has been presented to them.
The film opens with a quote from Virginia Woolf’s short story “A Haunted House,” aptly molding the film’s atmosphere and providing a foundation that will emotionally pay off later in the film. We meet C (Casey Affleck) and M (Rooney Mara), a young couple who occupy the film’s first few moments debating about whether they should move out of their remote home on the outskirts of Texas. Despite their disagreements, they appear to lead a comfortable and affectionate relationship. Contrasting to the pastoral elements in the story’s settings, the camera lurks suspiciously as the film’s score swells in drones of eeriness. Following a series of understated narrative beats, C is dead. At the morgue, M looks down on C’s dead corpse—a simple scab on his forehead from a silent, off-screen car accident. Eventually, M exits the frame. The camera stays its focus on C’s body which suddenly rises up and takes the narrative limelight.
It is at this particular moment that “A Ghost Story” threatens to crumble into the absurdity of its premise. This tale about a dead man walking around as a mute ghost, dressed in a white bedsheet with eyeholes cut out, is destined to be one of the year’s most polarizing films. Many would be hard pressed to find enough material for the story to be a short film, let alone a 90-minute feature film. But director, screenwriter and editor David Lowery wastes no time in establishing the thematic heft of the film. “A Ghost Story” is indeed a ghost story, in the sense that it has a ghost and that it’s a story, but it also belongs to many other genres in stories. It’s a love story, a science-fiction story, a fantasy story, a story about loneliness, a story about mortality and a story about human’s existential anxiety. Lowery doesn’t settle for simple sentimentality. Throughout the film’s many passages of textured colors and soundscapes, its story never lands on a predictable note, constantly upending our expectations.
The very essence of what makes “A Ghost Story” so brilliant is just how strikingly new its various metaphysical depictions are. The audaciousness of the film’s concept reminds me of European arthouse films like “Wings of Desire” and “The Seventh Seal”, while the down-to-earth approach of its setting and storyline reminds me of independent American films like those of Richard Linklater. In fact, “A Ghost Story’s” treatment of time is akin to that of Linklater’s “Boyhood.” In “A Ghost Story,” a combination of cinematography and editing is deftly employed to tip each scene along the film’s rhythmic flow. At moments, lapses of time transpire all at once in the frame, either spliced and sped up or raw and unfolding in real time. In others, Lowery launches his film through time with hard cuts. Sometimes it’s a few minutes, while at other times it’s several centuries. “A Ghost Story” perfectly captures the ineffable and distinct sensation where the rich details of specific moments and the flow of larger spans of time are harmoniously adjoined. Having worked on Shane Carruth’s marvelous “Upstream Color” as an editor, Lowery has developed an impeccable sense of how to capture time’s inexplicable emotional value.
We come to understand ghosthood as being in a perpetual purgatory as if one were stuck in the denial phase of grief. The plain aesthetic and behaviorisms of C’s ghost open up a different kind of relationship between the characters and the viewers. We begin to project ourselves onto C’s ghost. As a result, simple, rudimentary but totally powerful emotions are summoned. Paired with the film’s penchant for long takes, “A Ghost Story” burrows the same methodology of classics like Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” and Antonioni’s “L’Avventura,” which derive much of their power by asking audiences to patiently consider every second and every inch of the screen that has been presented to them. It breeds a highly active brand of intimacy, one that takes advantage of cinema’s deeply immersive qualities. A Ghost Story’s usage of a 1:33:1 aspect ratio only enhances this intimacy, as if we were peering through a keyhole into someone’s secrets or were confined to the claustrophobic corners of existential confusion.
By no means is “A Ghost Story” a perfect film, which is why the staunch film critic in me must dock it half a star. One scene involving a length monologue breaks the film out of its meditative trance, offering far too much telling instead of showing. Another scene towards the film’s conclusion teeters too close to cliché for a film that carries such uniqueness. But these nitpicks cannot diminish the totality of the film’s power. Although “A Ghost Story” contains many puzzles I have yet to solve, its intentions and spirituality are unquestionably apparent. Like a great piece of music, I trust that “A Ghost Story” will only get better with familiarity, as its details slowly manifest in my mind and actions. People will either love this film or hate everything in it. That’s not a sign of failure but of true artistic integrity. Only something so uncompromising in its bravery and craft can simultaneously tick off all the right things and all the wrong things. In its own exceptional and prodigious ways, “A Ghost Story” justifies the souls of those who live and those who lurk in between.