A Ghost Story takes a new look at existential dread
The easiest way to tell an original story is to change the perspective. It helps with breaking genre conventions, defying the expected in order to deliver something new. Every story is one sided—impressions, implications, understandings, and connections are all heavily subjective, and if every character has their own story than every story can be limitless.
Very rarely does a film tell a story from the perspective of a perceived antagonist. Some stories will try to explain another side, but only to offer character motivations that inform the ultimate correctness of the protagonist. But truth is never so one-sided. It can be a good exercise in empathy to consider the perspectives of the villain in your favorite movies.
For instance, try telling the story of The Thing from the perspective of the creature—suddenly, the film is a tragic struggle for survival by a confused interstellar traveler against a hostile, unforgiving alien world and its inhabitants. Through this lens, the film is simply a misunderstanding rather than horrid tale of isolation.
The same can be done with every genre. Take the haunted house, for instance. There have been movies that tell the story from the perspective of the ghost—The Others comes to mind—but most of them stay within the realm of the unsettling and scary.
A Ghost Story, the newest film by David Lowery, tells the story of a ghost, but leaves the jump scares at the door. The only dread found within it is existential in nature. It is a film full of longing and loneliness, posing more questions than answers. A Ghost Story asks only that its viewers give pause.
A Ghost Story is not a film for all audiences. Many moviegoers will find its measured pacing too slow, being used to quick cuts and nonstop action. Lowery is sometimes Malikesquein the way that he lingers on a particular visual—the movie flows like a gentle brook when most films swell like an ocean.
The film tells the story of C (Casey Affleck) and M (Rooney Mara), an unnamed couple living in a rundown house somewhere in America. C is a musician, a struggling one, and M seems to love him, but is wistful and restless, hoping to move on from their current home for something different.
Her dream is shattered, however, by the sudden loss of C in an accident near their home. After M identifies his body, C is resurrected as a ghost (as traditional a ghost as possible, white sheet and all). He wanders the hospital unseen, ignoring his chance to move towards the light, and eventually finds his way home. He watches silently as M moves through stages of grief, seeing hours and days in seconds, as M’s life moves on without him.
If viewers can accept the pacing of the film, the film itself is an excellent thought experiment. The acting in the film is convincing, especially considering the main character is wearing a sheet.
Affleck emotes the best that he can through the two dark, cut out eyes, although almost as much credit should be given to the costume designers for hinting at the sadness of C without turning him into a self-parody.
Rooney’s performance is better—she gives the audience a realistic portrayal of grief in an understated, complex way.
Overall, however, it is the progression of time in the film that makes the story as disquieting as it is. C is neither a malevolent nor a friendly ghost—he’s a presence, an unwitting withdrawal, a regrettable loss that stubbornly lingers in the doorway, leering at the life that happens around him.
His home is not large, and he looms across the thresholds of the quaint two bedroom, appearing most often to simply be in the way as the occupants move through.
As the house continues to stand through the years, C continues to drift through the halls, a permanent fixture, like the piano no one wants to move. The film reminds us that memories are the ghosts that haunt our lives—they are often fixated around a certain object or a certain place. Sometimes, the only way to reconcile a painful memory is to remove the object that harbors them.
A Ghost Story asks the audience to consider what happens to those memories when we leave them behind.