A Ghost Story begins with an ending. A loving partner and musician named C (Casey Affleck) is brutally killed in a car accident, leaving his grieving widow M (Rooney Mara) behind. But he is not gone. Spurning the chance to move onto the next world, C instead haunts his old house, watching M mourn, then recover, then, tragically, move on. Oh, and throughout C is dressed in nothing but a morgue sheet, his face hidden, gliding around the place like a reveller clad in the world’s least intimidating Halloween costume.
Yet to say anything else about A Ghost Story’s plot would be a disservice, mainly because A) there’s not very much of it, and B) the film’s second half is defined by a series of pleasant, if occasionally undercooked, surprises. Director David Lowery takes time to develop his world, and this gentle, rather slow film lives and dies by its own unique cinematic rules.
The good stuff first: the morgue sheet gamut is genuinely effective. Affleck is deeply compelling, and even initially distrustful audiences will learn just how easy it is to sympathise with an actor you largely can’t see. Later encounters with another ghost drive this pleasure home even further: the film’s best scene features two sheet-clad figures staring longingly at one another, communicating through subtitles.
But such flashes of creativity are few and far between, and the film’s latter half is a bone-dry endurance test. A long, static scene in which Mara stress-eats an entire pie was heaped with praise when the film premiered at Sundance, but it is sheer indulgence on Lowery’s part. And that’s not to mention an on the nose speech drunkenly delivered by a partygoer (singer-songwriter Will Oldham) that so gratuitously self-analyses the movie it might as well have been delivered down the barrel of the camera.
Worst of all, however, is when Lowery begins mucking about with the rules of A Ghost Story’s world. There is a limit to how much an audience can take, and by the time the screenplay mutates into a bizarre, half-baked riff on Groundhog Day (no, seriously) even open-minded viewers might find it hard to resist an eye roll.
Which is a genuine shame. Ultimately, at its best A Ghost Story is an aching portrait of grief. And at worst, it’s a curio – the kind of film a couple of philosophy first-years might have cobbled together on the weekend, armed with nothing but a camera, a bed sheet, and a beginner’s guide to existentialism.
A Ghost Story opens in cinemas on Thursday July 13.
