A Ghost Story (2017)

'A Ghost Story’ Starring Rooney Mara & Casey Affleck Weaves A Mesmerizing, Fascinating Tale

The hereafter is a slow, subtle affair in David Lowery’s evocative followup to Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, in which bedsheet-clad Affleck watches over bereaved partner Rooney Mara

Director David Lowery reunites with Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, defying horror movie conventions in this delicate portrait of a restless spirit

A Ghost Story’ Review: Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara Star in David Lowery’s Best Movie

The director of "Ain't Them Bodies Saints" and "Pete's Dragon" synthesizes his filmmaking strengths with this inventive supernatural tale.

How Can a Ghost in a Bedsheet Break Your Heart? Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara star in director David Lowery’s odd, beautiful little story of loss and acceptance

Haunting, literally.

Lowery’s overall strategy is to strip away the spectacle and fantasy from his ghost story — allowing us to focus on the pain of loss which is at the heart of this tale.

Lowery’s film captures something about our place in the greater scheme of the world and the beauty of the moment in a way that feels completely fresh and unbelievably moving. This isn’t a movie so much about grief—we’ve had a lot of those lately—as it’s about understanding the greater ebb and flow of human existence. Grief is merely a part of the historical canvas.



And yet while that may sound unbelievably heavy and pretentiously philosophical, the true miracle of “A Ghost Story” is that it’s never heavy-handed or moralizing. In fact, there’s almost no dialogue at all, and I’m not sure Lowery wants literal interpretations like the one I sorta offered in the previous paragraph. He’s made a film to lead you on your path, not to explicitly lay one out for you to follow. It’s a film that I can guarantee you people will revisit and discuss for years to come. It’s daring, strange, and unforgettable.

Thankfully, it looks like it won’t be the last time we see Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck, and Lowery together. “We decided on this one that we all need to do a movie together in Texas every three or four years. So hopefully this is the second of many,” Lowery said in the film’s press notes from Sundance.


David Lowery adds, “I love both of them individually, but I particularly love seeing the two of them together. There was a greater degree of comfort this time around. We know each other well, and have some degree of shorthand. I’m not the best at communicating with actors — I mumble a lot, and at this point they know how to interpret the nonsense coming out of my mouth.”


“We had very little prep time in Texas, so we met up in LA and talked and looked at pictures. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to shoot in 1:33:1—I love that aspect ratio, and I felt that in addition to feeling aesthetically right, it would telegraph to the audience that this movie wasn’t masquerading as a traditional motion picture. Andrew was excited about the challenge of that framing (which, like the ghost, proved to be far harder than we expected). Beyond that, we knew that we wanted to create a lot of really beautiful tableaux for these scenes where the camera was just going to look at something for one, two, three minutes at a time. Our primary reference was Gregory Crewdson — I photoshopped a ghost into a bunch of his photos for reference. We also looked at Apichatpong Weerasethakul films, and Tsai Ming Liang’s last two features. At one point we started watching Bela Tarr clips on YouTube, but then looked at our shooting schedule and realized we might be going too far.”


 thefilmstage.com/news/rooney-mara-casey-affleck-and-david-lowery-plan-to-shoot-a-new-film-every-few-years/