REVIEW: "A Ghost Story," Pretentious On the Surface, Proves Emotional in Mesmerizing Meditation on Grief, Time and Memory

One of this year's most striking and incredibly-effecting on-screen images (and its most simple yet distinct) is the sight of recent Oscar-winning actor Casey Affleck wearing a ghost sheet. But what could've easily been used as a cheap and silly gimmick--director David Lowery has confessed that it is a goofy image--instead becomes (and encompasses) a poetic meditation of loss, love and memory. In fact, Lowery makes the most of A Ghost Story's low-budget filmmaking capabilities (reportedly used off the funds from his live-action version of Pete's Dragon last year) that it's hard not to be mesmerized by the final product.

For one thing, the 4:3 aspect ratio (the image below) is used as if we're watching home movies of forgotten times. The translucent light effects on walls in certain scenes illustrate apparitions. The same goes for flickering lights in certain eerie moments. Quick cuts suggest the passage of time (a Terrence Malick influence, perhaps), including smoke and fog effects suggesting a change of seasons, lighting, and settings. If you pay attention to the credits, they state that Weta Digital was involved with the visual effects of this otherwise low-budget film. More specifically, several shots are very long, intimate and emotion-driven, including a now-arguably-famous scene of Mara scarfing down a pie, tears running down the end of her nose. Overall, this is simple, experimental, and great filmmaking.

Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck

Affleck and Mara (who both starred in Lowery's 2013 debut feature Ain't Them Bodies Saints) are riveting from frame one. They play a couple living in a small home in Texas. Affleck's musician C dies unexpectedly in a car crash one morning, leaving Mara's book-reading M devastated, but returns in the form of a physical ghost (a traditional sheet used like a costume with black eye holes a la "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown"). M eventually does leave the house (with memorial notes left in the walls), while C's "ghost" stays, along with a piano and a neighbor "ghost," until other residents come in (a Spanish family, a philosopher, construction workers and corporate workers).

There is a sense of eeriness at times, in Daniel Hart's haunting score and in the direction of C's "ghost". The way he stares does trigger a certain spookiness a la Michael Myers or any famous horror movie character. But this film is not a horror. It's a drama. And a human one, at that. Many viewers will likely see this as a secular view of the afterlife, on the other hand. But it's more akin to The Tree of Life than, say, Beetlejuice, what with the aforementioned Malick influences of the passage of time, and images of the cosmos and stars. And Affleck (along with Tom Hardy's performance in Dunkirk) has the most challenging and effecting body-language of any film role this year, from the different postures he makes, along with the movements of his arms and hands.

Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara

There's not a lot of spiritual discussion here, save for one scene where an apparently pessimistic man theorizes and argues logic and science over God and believes everything will be lost and forgotten one. (C apparently reacts against this, what with the flashing lights and the implied rubbled aftermath that results.) In an early scene, C has the option of heading through a door light in the hospital, but chooses to miss it (it closes momentarily) and goes to a different "exit"--his old home.

The way the film plays with time and how it does so is very unexpected and thought-provoking. What is this character doing in this time? Does there seem to be a quick passage of time apart from reality? A quick transition to a 19th-Century pilgrim family building a home finds a little girl writing a note and leaving it under a rock (like M). And a flashback suggests that C didn't want to move, apparently attached to the house's history. Perhaps he was already a ghost before he physically became one? The ghost (no matter how absurd it looks) can poetically represent the memory of a loved one who has passed, and his/her presence in that place they left their legacy at. And if you stay through the credits, you'll hear quiet and misty effects such as winds and fields, suggesting a form of meditation and memory. I haven't seen film credits like this since, perhaps, the 1990 re-release of Fantasia, as well as Cast Away (2000) and No Country For Old Men (2007).

Perhaps no film this year has challenged or provoked me more than A Ghost Story. At its heart, it's a story about moving on. Not just from homes, but also from heartache and from tragedy.