A
Ghost Story (***, 12A, 92 mins) could well lay claim to being
the most quietly transcendental film ever made about the benefits of moving on,
but it has a funny way of showing them. That writer-director David Lowery is up
to something extraordinary becomes apparent from his hushed prologue,
juxtaposing visions of the cosmos with intimate tableaux of devoted young
homesteaders: a beardy musician (Casey Affleck) and his more practically minded
wife (Rooney Mara). That devotion will endure even after death parts them one
foggy morn – removing the male partner from the picture in a high-speed car
collision – but in an unusual form: an Affleck revived as a white sheet with
baleful eyeholes.
It sounds like a joke – and might be taken as such.
It’s mordantly amusing to watch Affleck sit up in the morgue, refuse to go
towards the light, and instead shuffle back to his own kitchen. Remove that
sheet, and he’s Patrick Swayze in Ghost;
with it, and the burden it implies, he’s closer to the undead of TV’s The Returned, not so much hungry as
homesick, clinging rather pitifully to pre-existing routine. What good this
does him remains open to question: unable to intervene unduly in the lives of
the living, his fate is to watch his beloved grieve, recover, repaint, kiss
another man and eventually move out, leaving him behind with new,
Spanish-speaking housemates.
What elevates A
Ghost Story is Lowery’s gift for atmosphere, already evident in his
Mara/Affleck-pairing 2013 breakthrough Ain’t
Them Bodies Saints. Long takes – of the lovers in bed, or the widow choking
back her loss with mouthfuls of pie – bear witness to bonds being forged and
mourned, time pressing on; the twilight mood Lowery conjures with
cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo is so beguiling you may overlook the
spectral characterisation. Ghost Affleck is a terrific sight gag, source of the
film’s many indelible images, but he’s also a literal sadsack, the poster ghoul
for a generation who’ve spent long, lonely nights checking their exes’ social
media for the one sign they might be missed.
Much is conveyed without words: the Ghost’s hope
that his love will be returned to him, his despair and fury once it becomes
clear she won’t. The prominence Lowery affords to music – having folkie Will
Oldham declaim on Beethoven’s Ninth, a score nodding towards “Stairway to
Heaven” – suggests he may be proposing a hipster update of those slender yet
lingering requiems (“There’s a Ghost in My House”, “She’s Not There”) that once
haunted the charts. Either way, this director’s humdrum vision of the afterlife
remains drolly diverting: no sexy pottery here, just endless pottering, coupled
to a general sense of being ignored. There will be living souls who identify
with that.
A Ghost Story opens in selected cinemas from today.
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