Film Review: A Ghost Story

There’s always been something quaint about the cultural image of ghosts as beings clad in bedsheets with eye-holes; reducing these cosmic entities, these manifestations of mortality, to images of soiled domesticity.

This absurd blend of terror, cliché and comedy is what director David Lowery (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) perfectly deploys in A Ghost Story. In this moving, philosophical and playful tale, Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara play C and M, who live in a modest Texas home. When C dies, he returns as a sheet-clad spectre, haunting the home. Now operating outside of time, C experiences the past, present and future of the house he loved; an experience that shows him the cosmic (in)significance of emotion, connection and individual life.

Lowery’s visuals beautifully evoke these themes. With a 1:33:1 ratio, the film itself feels as if it’s trying to break free of physical restraints, while his non-linear timeline creates a sense of meaning beyond the conventional chronology of a single arc or lifetime. The cute quirkiness of our sheet-clad ghost, meanwhile, imbues these metaphysical musings with levity and warmth.

A now infamous scene in which Rooney Mara returns from C’s funeral and grief-eats an entire pie in one unbroken sitting exemplifies this. Her joyless, automaton-like stabbing of the pie and her mournful expression convey the overwhelming nature of her devastation, which is manifesting as a mind-body split. As the scene stretches over an unfathomable five minutes, it challenges the viewer to empathise and experience not only M’s grief, but their own bodily experience of time and emotion.

It’s here that A Ghost Story may lose some viewers, who could understandably feel that Lowery is playing a cinematic endurance prank on them. But watching Mara experience grief, time and her body so thoroughly, so inescapably, so viscerally, eventually becomes a meditative exemplar of what A Ghost Story is; a simultaneously tragic and comic exploration of the people, places and loves that we hold on to.