David Lowery makes a sheet-clad ghost painfully lonely in this patient, affecting film about bereavement. Rooney Mara gives the grief weight, though the long pauses and a solemn speech occasionally test our goodwill.
A Ghost Story asks us to spend 93 minutes with a figure under a sheet and take his loneliness seriously. David Lowery’s film is moving, peculiar and worth the patience it asks for, although its solemnity occasionally becomes hard work. The ghost’s presence makes us think about being left behind and watching without being able to join in. That is a sound reason to make a ghost film, and the director is willing to let that waiting become uncomfortable.
Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara play C and M, with little in those names to help us get to know them. Once C becomes the sheet-clad ghost, the performance has to manage without facial expressions. Annell Brodeur’s costume looks ridiculous if we stand back and consider it, yet the stillness under it gradually becomes expressive. We start looking for the smallest suggestion of a response, and the sheet gives us little help.
The pie scene is where the method becomes hardest to dismiss. Rooney Mara eats for long enough that we lose the usual reassurance that a cut will arrive as soon as the point has been made. We were more upset than we expected. Her persistence at this small task makes the grief feel physically exhausting, and she does not offer a tidy expression for us to read and move on from. There is something uncomfortable about being made to watch her for so long, which seems the right discomfort.
Andrew Droz Palermo’s cinematography depends on holding still, so that a body remaining in a room can become an event. The house is important here, and production designers Tom Walker and Jade Healy give it enough ordinariness to make the ghost look out of place. We recognise a space for everyday living, even with that unlikely figure occupying it. The framing leaves us time to inspect the ghost and decide that no further detail would make him more convincing.
David Lowery also edits, and the changes of pace matter as much as the long takes. He lets an ordinary action consume our attention, then makes time feel suddenly difficult to measure. The effect unsettles us because we have begun to expect each moment to last, and the cuts take away that small certainty. Daniel Hart’s score is openly mournful, and works because the performances are so restrained. The music can carry feelings that the ghost has no way to show.
The trouble comes when David Lowery’s writing tries to explain the questions that the images have already raised. A monologue about permanence makes the film sound more pleased with its seriousness than it has elsewhere, and we wanted it to stop spelling things out. Some of the held shots also remain held after our attention has begun to wander. We would not ask for briskness, but a few shorter holds would have kept us closer to the ghost’s loneliness. The speech is the greater interruption, because the quiet scenes have already given us plenty to think about.
For a supernatural film, this is unusually willing to risk looking foolish and making little happen. Its faith in the sheet pays off because we eventually stop wondering how it is being worn and start wondering what waiting like this would feel like. That is enough to forgive the occasional lecture. Watch it when there is no need to hurry, and when a film about bereavement is something you can bear.
