It’s difficult to describe director David Lowery’s daring new feature, the micro-budget Sundance sensation A Ghost Story, without spoiling its twists and revelations. At the crudest level, it is exactly what its title promises. Somewhere in the Southwest, a young couple identified only as M (Rooney Mara) and C (Casey Affleck) dwell relatively contentedly in a ramshackle suburban house. Then C is killed in a car accident, and his spirit resists the urge to move on, taking the form of a makeshift Halloween costume: a human shape draped from head to toe in a plain white sheet, with two holes for eyes.
C seems to be bound to the house he shared with M, but his ability to directly interact with the world of the living is limited. Mostly he can only watch, a mute and helpless observer, as M processes her loss and tries to move on with her life. Lowery (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Pete’s Dragon) presents this supernatural tragedy with a quiet deliberateness that borders on the perverse. He dribbles in brief flashbacks of M and C’s relationship, but most of the film’s scenes consist of shots of C’s spirit wandering around in a vaguely melancholy daze. Sometimes he watches M, sometimes he stares out the window, and sometimes he just stands expectantly in a room, waiting.
Some viewers will doubtlessly lose patience with A Ghost Story’s methods within the first 20 minutes. There’s no denying that this an audaciously slow film, one that bears a closer resemblance to Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s unhurried, enigmatic works than anything from the American indie scene. Certainly, a film that includes a four-minute shot of Rooney Mara silently eating a pie is not for everyone. However, Lowery’s approach offers an inspired and evocative variation on conventional depictions of restless spirits and haunted houses.
Time might be fleeting for the living, but C’s viewpoint establishes how vast and disorienting existence might seem if one had nothing to do but watch. For Affleck’s bedsheet-clad specter, time alternately seems to stretch out forever and lurch forward suddenly. M eventually moves away, and a single mom and her two children move in and make the space their own. However, C is trapped in the house, time’s passage a molasses-thick smear where there is no sense of scale, only occurrences and impressions. His only remaining tether to M is a handwritten note which she tucked into a crack in the wall; C scratches endlessly at the plaster, but he can’t quite reach the message.
Near the midpoint of the film, C listens as a party guest (Will Oldham) launches into a sour, despairing rant about the annihilating effects of time and the pointlessness of legacies. It briefly seems as though Lowery might be positioning this nihilistic monologue as the film’s thesis statement. New residents move in and out, the house is torn down, and a lonely futuristic cityscape sprawls out before C. Then, abruptly, A Ghost Story takes a plunge into the truly bizarre and wondrous. To say more would rob the viewer of a remarkable experience, but suffice to say that new thematic horizons emerge, tearing down notions of linearity and the self.
A Ghost Story is, admittedly, a bit difficult to love unconditionally. By design, it’s replete with long, wearying stretches of nothing, and it’s a bit too assured of its own profundity. On the other hand, Lowery’s attempts to leaven the alienating opacity with well-worn poltergeist tropes undercut the film’s bracing originality. Still, in an American cinematic landscape that has become distressingly homogenized, A Ghost Story is a singularly unruly and intriguing work.
Opens Friday, July 28 at the Landmark Tivoli Theatre.
