A Ghost Story is an artistic film with some beautiful visuals, heart devouring themes and at least one pretty harrowing scene. It’s not a horror film, though. It’s not a drama. A lot is said through the camera work and without dialogue or narration. However, it’s still not not a ghost story. It’s just also a grief story, a story about love and our little lives, and what they mean to us, even after a millennia passes by. If you enjoy slow burns with philosophical and existential elements, this one’s for you.
Premise
The film is less about the events of our protagonist’s life as a living person, and a lot of the action is out of order or presented in a way that you’re only aware of earlier events at later times. It’s hard not to spoil the film through describing the sequence of events. In simpler terms, there is a marriage and a house in the country. The man dies in a car crash, and after many months the distraught widow then moves out of the house.
Wait, What’s Going On?
The story begins and ends almost immediately with C’s death. But then something strange happens, he becomes a bed sheet ghost. This is something so often associated with children playing games and with Halloween costumes. It’s not something you’d expect to find in a serious film. It’s worth considering David Lowery’s choice to use this specific visual image, but it aids the hollow feeling we observe the ghost experiencing. He moves about the house slowly. He sits on the couch, ignored. There isn’t anything frightening about him, but it’s unnerving, this draped spectre wandering aimlessly in his old home, haunting it without knowledge of why or when, or who he was.
And then his wife moves out, and others move in. He haunts them. We watch as time ends, begins, and circles itself in such profound, bizarre and sometimes terrifying ways. This idea that time is infinite, that everything that happens has happened before and will happen again can make our stomachs tie up into knots as dread settles in.
Love Binds Us, But So Does Existence Itself
C only frees himself the second circle around the universe. We find in this second instance that there are now two sheet ghosts in the home, doing the same aimless thing. It’s only when he reads a note that is hidden behind a board in the decrepit old house that he suddenly, without warning, vanishes.
The purpose of his particular journey is tied to his wife, but it’s also tied to knowing himself. Though, we never get to see what he reads on that note. All we know is that he spends two eternities looking for something he only knew when alive. C gives up a power to his own repeating patterns, his own psyche, and isn’t even aware of it until it happens. This speaks to the parts of ourselves that don’t know why we do things or don’t know why we want certain things. We only know that maybe a part of us had it before, and that’s enough. Sometimes the release comes unexpectedly, through the smallest deviation, rather than from some profound understanding of life. But maybe they’re the same thing.
This brings up the notion of free will too. The way C is caught in time and the in-between of life and death is thrust upon him circumstantially. His release comes from remembering something that matters, finally, about himself and who he loved here, and not just bending towards the automatic pattern of previous selves.
Rating: 4.5/5
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To watch A Ghost Story, head on over to A24’s website.
