‘A Ghost Story’ a haunting look at love and loss
Don’t let the title fool you. The scares are scarce in “A Ghost Story,” and it’s all the better for it.
Haunting in a totally different way, the latest from writer-director David Lowery (“Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”) is a hypnotic, almost meditative look at love, loss and legacy.
A young married couple (Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara) are preparing to leave their modest home. They spend some lingering, loving moments together. Then he’s killed in a car wreck in front of their house.
She identifies the body at the morgue, covers it with a sheet and leaves. A few seconds later, he rises up under that sheet — which has to be the size of a couple of California kings or whatever Shaq sleeps under, and now has black holes for eyes — and trudges home. He stands in the corner, motionless under that sheet, and simply observes her life.
I keep using “he” and “she” because the characters aren’t identified until the credits as “C” (Affleck) and “M” (Mara). It’s just one example of the minimalism of the film that debuted at Sundance.
Soon after his death, he watches her eat a condolence pie in one remarkably lengthy, emotional take. The scene goes on so long, in fact, “A Ghost Story” begins to feel as though it were adapted from a short film titled “Rooney Mara Eats a Pie.”
Seasons change, and he’s still standing there, listless, like a sullen teenager. He’s always there, always watching.
For the first hour or so, if you played a drinking game where you took a swig after every line of dialogue, you’d still be able to safely drive home from the theater.
There’s a certain beauty to all of it, though, that showcases how it feels to become untethered. But if that’s what death is really like, I’m gonna live forever, like that song in “Fame.”
“A Ghost Story” is about as far from a traditional summer movie — or a traditional movie, period, regardless of the season — that you can get.
As a result, you’ll either end up feeling emotions that you weren’t entirely sure you had, or you’ll leave the theater grousing because you just spent 80 minutes or so watching an Academy Award winner stand under a sheet.
Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4567. Follow @life_onthecouch on Twitter.