A Ghost Story (2017)

A Ghost Story
The reception of David Lowery’s enigmatic philosophical fable seems to divide cleanly between two groups: There are those, like me, who found its eon-hopping time structure as entrancing as a well-told campfire story and found ourselves thinking about life and death and the passage of time in a different way for days after seeing it. Then there were those who could never get past the goofiness of the film’s central conceit: Casey Affleck dies, then stands around in a bedsheet with two holes cut out in it for centuries while the world changes around him. To me, the archetypal design and intentional wit of that costume was an integral part of this deceptively simple movie’s lasting fascination. Put me on Team Bedsheet.

8. A Ghost Story
Every once in a while, a particularly effects-heavy blockbuster gets singled out as being particularly post-actor, usually due to a reliance on CG imagery. David Lowery’s A Ghost Story earns that distinction better than most, but it uses only a common bedsheet to obscure its central performer. Casey Affleck plays a musician who dies, then returns to haunt his lover (Rooney Mara) and their house as a stereotypically garbed specter, visible only to the audience. As the ghost cannot or will not leave his former home, the world moves on without him. The film initially resembles a close-up study of relationship strife and grief, but as it drifts forward in time, it turns into something both sweeping and unknowably intimate. Lowery continues to separate his actors with blocking, a taller 1.33 frame, a Will Oldham monologue, and, as ever, that bedsheet, yet the effects aren’t entirely isolating. Quite to the contrary: This is one of the year’s most transporting experiences.

A Ghost Story
Resistance is futile. Director David Lowery sucks you into his haunting, lyrical look at mortality, complete with a ghost wearing a stupid bedsheet with sad cutout eyes. Floating through mind-bendingly fluid time and space, the movie needs almost no words to talk about big subjects like the meaning of life, the weight of existence, and our built-in resistance to letting go.

9. ‘A Ghost Story’
David Lowery’s supernatural tale of timeless devotion involves a woman (Rooney Mara) haunted by her dead lover (Casey Affleck). Here’s an ardent, ambitious, challenging experiment that restores our faith in film as an art form.

A GHOST STORY
Let’s first address the elephant in the room: Casey Affleck stars in this film. Some will find that a problem. He plays a man who, after perishing in a car accident, awakens in the morgue as a ghost with a sheet over his head and proceeds to haunt first his grieving wife (Rooney Mara), and then the succeeding residents of his Texas home. What sounds silly on paper—an Oscar winner under a sheet, framed by a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, in search of closure before passing on—proves to be a bold, poetic meditation on love, loss, and mankind’s pursuit of serenity. And Rooney Mara is dynamite. You’ll never look at a chocolate cream pie the same way again.

A Ghost Story
Composer: Daniel Hart
In constructing one of the best scores of the year for one of the best films of the year, Daniel Hart has created something that will get under your skin and not leave you for weeks. From soft tremolo strings and electronic drums (Safe Safe Safe) to genuinely creepy moments (Sciunt Se Esse Mortui) and operatic voices (Viventes Enim), this is the soundtrack that keeps on giving. Come for the haunting, revisited themes, but stay for Dark Rooms’ astonishing I Get Overwhelmed.

A Ghost Story


David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story” isn’t about the horror, instead it focuses thematically on loss and regret. It deals with death and the passage of time. This haunting film deals with leaving this earth along with the sensations involved. Daniel Hart is responsible for scoring the movie and his most recent use of blending gothic orchestration, classicism and traditional folk have resulted in a sound that is uniquely his own. The score was a challenge and very much experimental but works for this particular film.

6. A Ghost Story

Daniel Hart’s bittersweet song ‘I Get Overwhelmed’ is something of an anthem for our bed-sheeted friend. David Lowery lets it play out for a full five minutes in a scene written especially for it, and, scattered like ashes, you hear traces of it across the cues. The film’s hazy, unbroken shots and minimal dialogue enables Hart’s existential score to become the lingua franca between living and dead.

9. Daniel Hart – “A Ghost Story”

What’s impressive and really exciting about film composers—when they’re really good—is their versatility. From film to film they can dive into any style that a picture demands. Such is the case with American musician Daniel Hart. Coming from indie pop roots (the Chapel Hill band The Physics of Meaning), one might think his lane was small, but the artist demonstrates how the classically trained often have enough skill to morph like a chameleon if need by. Hart’s also in the romantic electronic band Dark Rooms which might as well be from a different epoch from the Southern-flavored, cripple crowe’d banjos and violins of the “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” soundtrack. Ever since, Hart’s been on the radar in a big way and he continues his musical evolution with the moving soundtrack to David Lowery’s spellbinding “A Ghost Story.” Made up largely of spectre-like string orchestration, in Hart’s hands and a celestial sheen of production, “A Ghost Story” sounds like sad and gorgeous moonbeams lighting up the silent bottom of the ocean. Much like the character’s grieving and aching hearts, and the movie’s expansive thoughts on the universe, the meaning of time and the limitless notions of love, Hart’s evocative, ghostly score expresses an existential loneliness that is truly unforgettable. And we haven’t even mentioned Dark Rooms’ “I Get Overwhelmed,” which is just that: an emotionally overwhelming, romantic dance song that is so haunting, on its own terms, is probably our favorite song of the year, period.

10. A Ghost Story (Daniel Hart)
Composer Daniel Hart and director David Lowery continue their fine collaboration with this offbeat indie drama, the story of a deceased man (Casey Affleck) who returns as a white-sheeted spectre to observe his bereaved wife (Rooney Mara) going on with her life. Hart's undulating, disharmonious score is a real gem, fluctuating strings veering from the melancholy to the menacing in a manner that recalls the likes of Arvo Part, or maybe Johnny Greenwood's more accessible film work. A diverse score that also encompasses Latin chanting and a Hart-penned pop song, 'I Get Overwhelmed', it's one of the year's most distinguished.