A Ghost Story
starring Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara
written and directed by David Lowery
Rating: ♦♦◊◊◊
This film wasn’t what I expected. I was expecting some kind of horror film. Although I usually don’t go in for horror, the choice at the local DVD rental shop these days is so awful - dominated by comic book movies - that I gave in. But it wasn’t what I expected.
Casey Affleck plays a man, “C,” a musician who becomes a ghost and remains in the house he shares with his wife, “M” (Mara). They are a young, childless couple in their first home. C loves the house and resists the idea of changing upward. C dies in a car accident on the street outside and afterward his spirit, covered in a white sheet with holes cut into it like a Halloween costume, silently occupies the home with his wife, unable to communicate, but observing only. Time passes. The ghost exists outside of time. It is able to go back in time to pioneer days when the land was first built upon. Eventually, M moves on and moves away, and the home is taken by another family. But the ghost - unchanged and unchanging - stays in the house on the same geographic spot, the place that C loved in life. The house is abandoned, and the ghost is still there. Time passes and the decrepit home is demolished, but the ghost is still there. More time passes and the lot is redeveloped as a skyscraper, and the ghost is still there in that three-dimensional space.
There is a lot of silence in the film as the ghost tries to - I don’t know - to comprehend its situation. In a way it’s a quiet, sad movie. The ghost doesn’t know its own purpose. Is it waiting for someone? Who? Is it waiting for something? What? What is this place? Why is it here?
While not a scary movie as such, A Ghost Story feels like a haunting story of love and loss. It feels less like a commercial big screen movie than an experimental, or independent film. It was made with a budget of only $100,000 US. It was okay. I mean, I liked it, but not enough to watch it a second time.