Director David Lowery’s A Ghost Story blends the romantic with the existential for this cerebral drama that takes a dense look at life after death
Director David Lowery burst onto the scene in 2013 with the moody throwback film Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. Since then he’s continued to surprise audiences, following up that film with a beautifully rendered remake of Walt Disney’s Pete’s Dragon. His third feature film, A Ghost Story, boasts similar sentiments to his previous features, but expands on them with a quiet and contemplative elegy on life and the afterlife. Slow and baffling at times, A Ghost Story follows you, not unlike the undead spirit within its frame.
A young couple known only as M and C (Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck respectively) live a simple life in a rural track house. When C is killed in a car crash, his spirit returns, covered by a sheet, to the house he and M shared. When M leaves the house C is bound to it, forced to watch all manner of life pass around him.
Your response to A Ghost Story will vary as Lowery creates a contemplative and near-silent examination of how people process death and what might be waiting on the other side. M and C are briefly introduced via the house they’ve recently purchased. Weird bumps in the night start happening, implying that the opening text from Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House is all too true. Before things can become too intense C is quickly dispatched and the rest of the film looks at his walk through life.
It’s beneficial that Casey Affleck spends 95 percent of the movie underneath a sheet, as other writers have mentioned (even here on Culturess) it’s hard to separate the actor’s personal history from this story. Watching him silently stalk his wife and have poltergeist-esque tendencies when she has a brief kiss with a coworker all have a certain ick factor to them. Once Mara leaves the narrative though the actor’s presence takes on a less disturbing tone.
Affleck and Mara have a chemistry they’ve cultivated since their first pairing with Lowery and watching them play a couple whose fractured romance isn’t revealed to the end is the film’s high point. Lowery’s camera captures the two in their most intimate moments – a long sequence of the two kissing is particularly poignant – and their worst. A lovely montage at the end as they argue over the house leaves you rethinking the entire feature up to that point. Mara receives the brunt of the dialogue and audience connection as M. Her character’s love for C is palpable, especially when she sees his dead body on a slab and can’t handle it, throwing the sheet back over him and running off, never to look back. A 15-minute sequence of her infamously eating a pie is a harsh scene to sit through because of its repetitive motion but does capture the intricacies of grief—and the need to drown in something, even if it’s pie.
Mara’s exit turns A Ghost Story into the existentially cerebral film it truly is. It will also determine how you approach the rest of the film. Lowery’s afterlife is one devoid of any religious component in favor of a waiting game. C spends his days watching the living, whether it be a Spanish-speaking single mother and her children or a group of young people having a houseparty, or talking to a fellow ghost who doesn’t know who they’re waiting for. Life goes on around him with nary a care in the world, and he learns about the repetition of history. Just as a house is built, lived in and destroyed, we are also built, live, and are destroyed.
Regardless of religion or the broad concept of “paradise,” Lowery’s main conceit is discussing the need for a legacy. C and M’s relationship is one meant to transcend time and space, or can it? Once M leaves the need for love disappears. C is a songwriter and his music plays at various points in the movie, showing that even art repeats itself through the ages. (By the way, I defy you to not have the film’s theme “I Get Overwhelmed” stuck in your head.) Watching Mara on the floor, headphones in her ear and listening to “their” song, as her hand almost grazes C’s sheet is a beautiful image. A speech in the middle of the movie threatens to put too fine a point on things as it literally lays out the film’s message, but it is a wonderfully scripted moment.
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A Ghost Story won’t appeal to everyone, but it is a film that will leave you thinking. This all about Lowery and his expertise as a filmmaker. The film will leave you with lingering questions about life, and what Mara’s character wrote in the wall. I get overwhelmed by Lowery and his ability to conjure emotion.