A Ghost Story (2017)
Directed by David Lowery
Recently deceased, a white-sheeted ghost returns to his suburban home to console his bereft wife, only to find that in his spectral state he has become unstuck in time, forced to watch passively as the life he knew and the woman he loves slowly slip away.
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36 films that influenced A Ghost Story
What critics say influenced A Ghost Story
It’s right up there with “Truly Madly Deeply,” in which Alan Rickman returns from the dead to hang with his ex (Juliet Stevenson), only to realize his presence makes things worse.
It’s about love’s link to the afterlife, more Tibetan Book of the Dead than its warm and fuzzy big screen interpretations “Ghost” or “Truly, Madly Deeply.”
Just when you're beginning to wish you were watching "Truly, Madly, Deeply" instead, a motley group of posers takes over, bristling with piercings and pontifications.
Like Truly Madly Deeply and Ghost , it posits what happens when one-half of a couple has shuffled off this mortal coil.
Yes, Lowery’s residential Texan locale superficially echoes scenes from The Tree of Life , but beyond this vague pictorial similarity there’s no comparison.
As with Lowery’s first pairing of Affleck and Mara, 2013’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints , a Texan crime romance with echoes of Badlands , the comparisons with Malick are apt again here: in the spirit of The Tree Of Life , A Ghost Story is both deeply intimate and vast in scope, bridging years, then centuries, before looping back on itself.
This a movie that will remind you of the best, most thought-provoking moments of Interstellar , The Time Machine , A.I. and The Tree of Life .
Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” (2011) is the closest comparison film in terms of tone, mood and narrative construction to this picture, and that is an eccentric compliment.
When Lowery resorts to aping the spacey visuals of Terrence Malick’s similarly laborious “The Tree Of Life,” “A Ghost Story” is still a pleasure to look at.
(Call it a sapling sprouting from the soil around The Tree Of Life .)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Characters Themes Visuals
The almost ridiculous quality of Affleck’s sheet-covered spook finds a parallel in the slightly silly, red-eyed monkey spirits of Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives .
The touchstone here is Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2011 film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, an animist Thai masterpiece that Lowery wrote about rapturously on his blog.
It’s as if the vaporous Thai favorite Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives had been reconceived by the maestro of clunks, M. Night Shyamalan.
The primitiveness of Affleck’s costume in some ways recalls the low-rent, matter-of-fact magic of the great Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose films (including “Tropical Malady” and “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”) often unfold along the porous boundaries between this world and the next.
Hart’s music oscillates between tender strings and grand orchestral pieces that imply a cosmic significance, in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey, on the most mundane set pieces.
Eventually, Lowery even works time travel into the narrative, giving “A Ghost Story” a kind of rural “2001: A Space Odyssey” vibe.
The ghost sees families come and go in rapid succession, with A Ghost Story eventually building towards a crescendo (best left unspoiled, but if you don’t want it alluding to, skip ahead now) that suggests that this is more of a science fiction tale than a horror one – a look at the changing face of American society in the same way 2001: A Space Odyssey is a tale of mankind’s evolution.
He stays and watches what remains of the time his partner M (Rooney Mara) spends there and then some – imagine spending an entire film in Kubrick’s Renaissance Room from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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If this setup reminds you of another “Ghost” story starring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, rest assured there’s no medium played by Whoopi Goldberg arriving to intervene and no pottery was harmed during the making of this picture.
Unlike such genre diverse films as the 1946 Abbott and Costello comedy, “The Time of Their Lives,” the 1947 supernatural romance, “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” and more recent features as the two versions of “Ghostbusters” and the Patrick Swayze-Demi Moore weeper “Ghost,” spirits and humans do not interact in this story.
Imagine if the 1990 tearjerker Ghost had been remade as a movie that thoroughly examined the nature of grief, lamented the passing of love, and tried desperately to articulate the ineffable paradox in searching for permanence from within a transient life.
I bring up the late actor because of his appearance in the thematically similar and far more engaging and certainly more visually and narratively kinetic "Ghost."
Again, Spielberg provides a helpful point of reference, though here it’s not E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) but A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), with its epochal time frame and keening sense of abandonment.
This a movie that will remind you of the best, most thought-provoking moments of Interstellar , The Time Machine , A.I. and The Tree of Life .
(In doing so, she also reveals one of Lowery’s unusual influences: The pie-eating is a near copy of a scene in Chantal Akerman’s Je Tu Il Elle .)
A figure entirely covered in a bedsheet with eyeholes cut in it is perhaps the broadest caricature of the idea — a silly, naively childish image, one more suggestive of Scooby-Doo or lighthearted Halloween sequences (à la E.T. ) than a serious ghost story.
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Initially, watching Affleck in a big white sheet reminded me of Woody Allen’s encounters with Death in Love and Death but the simplicity of the stricken soul moving about literally undercover begins to take on real power.
The conceit that motivates this turn makes the science behind, say, Shane Carruth's Upstream Color seem about as naturally explicable as that of An Inconvenient Truth —and at the same time, it's a conceit that basically rips off, then dumbs down, Christopher Nolan's Interstellar .
It’s shot with elegance, grace, and design, yet it still preserves a sense of spontaneity and associative logic thanks to some on-set editing by Shane Carruth, of Primer (2004) and Upstream Color (2013) fame.
It was tough to predict that one of these triumphs would be the latest project from Pete’s Dragon director David Lowery, whose work I first encountered at my very first Sundance in 2013, when he was in Park City as both the editor of Shane Carruth’s intoxicatingly strange Upstream Color and the writer-director of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints .
Lowery edited the moody, metaphysical mystery Upstream Color in 2013, and this year he co-wrote the screenplay for Alexandre Moors’s adaptation of the Iraq War novel The Yellow Birds .