A Ghost Story (2017)

2. A Ghost Story
Dir: David Lowery
Deceptively quiet and disarmingly easy to poke fun at due to Casey Affleck’s be-sheeted performance, this intriguing film addresses the question of what a ghost — and, indeed, a ghost story — might be.

A Ghost Story — A 40-page script that transcends space and time
David Lowery's A Ghost Story has no definitive plot. Its script is only 40 sparse pages. It was inspired by a simple image—a sheet-wearing ghost with eyeholes, much like a lo-fi Halloween costume—and its production was driven largely by intuition. Yet the film manages to evoke one of the most complex feelings in the human spectrum: That particular brand of melancholy that comes from realizing time and space belong to no one.

In the first act, C (Casey Affleck) dies in a car accident and returns to haunt his young wife, M (Rooney Mara), in their Texas fixer-upper. Then, life goes on. (There is at once nothing sadder or more hopeful than that.) In the spellbinding second and third acts, A Ghost Story sucks us into its metaphysical world, where time melts into itself and restless souls can only hope for eternal return. It reminds us that we are simply passing through.

From the beginning, Lowery was cognizant of the risky nature of the project. He self-financed it so there "wasn’t any need to go pitch it to anyone or to knock on doors asking for money," Lowery told us in an interview. "We were going to make this movie small enough that we could afford to make it ourselves." Lowery kept the crew small and tightly-knit, mostly comprised of previous collaborators, because "knew this was going to be that type of movie that needed that type of support and structure to succeed."

"I wonder now, looking back," Lowery said, "if we'd had more prep time, if I would have lost my nerve and pulled the plug on it. Because there were plenty of times while shooting that I wanted to do that, but we were already too deep into it. There was a point in production where I lost all my confidence, and every day I was convinced it wasn't working. I thought it was too high-concept to succeed. I was prepared for it to fail."

But Lowery plowed ahead, even as the mechanics of the ghost costume threatened to undermine the film itself. "To make [the ghost] costume work in three dimensions was a feat of mechanical engineering," Lowery said. "I was consistently sick to my stomach thinking that it would not work. 'Clunky' is the best way to describe [the early footage of the ghost]. It just felt like someone wearing a sheet stumbling through a frame. It had no elegance, no grace, no sense of the ethereal. It just felt dumb, and it took a while for us to figure out how to make him not dumb. There were little glimpses here and there that kind of gave us hope that we might be able to pull it off, but it still took a lot of refinement. And not just with the costume, but also how we shot it. How he moved. How he existed in the world. The frame rate that we shot him in. All those things were things we figured out as we went along."

A Ghost Story — David Lowery
Quietly yet overwhelmingly philosophical, this film combines the sweetest, smallest moments of indie drama with the universal scale of Terrence Malick’s later films. Set in one house across multiple decades, we follow C’s ghost (Casey Affleck) as M (Rooney Mara) copes with his passing. At its largest the film ponders the weight of eternity and insignificance, but at its smallest it rests on the pop song that M listens to, trying to remember C.

It’s beautiful to watch a film dedicate a lot of time to the tiny moments that other films would otherwise glaze over, or cut. The film addresses its audience saying “this couple lying in bed, this is the most important part of life. This cake that M eats, this is the most important part of life.” The point the film presents is that life and time are immeasurable, and in the wake of that, you have two choices. The first is to let life pass by, something C does both in life and as a ghost, and the second is treat everything as significant and keep moving forward, as M does, and as the film wants you to do. If you want something purely cinematic, but straight from the heart, look no further.

A GHOST STORY by David Lowery.
No one had ever seen anything remotely like it before. Nor are we ever likely to see anything like it again. It's utterly transfixing--funny, wondrous, wildly creative and cosmic about life, love and death, all at the same time. It shouldn't have worked at all but my God, how it does.

8. A Ghost Story
It's a lonely existence, being a ghost. After crashing his car and dying, C (Casey Affleck) is condemned to haunt his old house. For decades – maybe centuries – he remains on the fringes of human existence, unable to communicate with successive occupants except by occasionally smashing a plate, remembering his wife M (Rooney Mara), even drifting back into a time before the house was built, but always alone. Affleck's ghost costume is the simplest possible: a sheet with two black eyes painted on it. From this joke-shop image, director David Lowery conjures a moving reflection on memory and the passage of life into death.

1. A Ghost Story
David Lowery’s haunting drama is one of a kind — from its View-Master perspective to Rooney Mara eating a pie in tearfully cathartic fashion to Casey Affleck wearing a white sheet for most of the movie. The wildly nonlinear tale of a phantom stuck to the home he adored is also a poignant examination of life and death, everlasting love and how the world moves on long after we’re gone. The movie's 87 minutes last in your mind far beyond when the credits end.

10.) A Ghost Story – Andrew Droz Palermo
This is the first of two films with very little dialogue on this list, but the movies themselves could not be more different. A Ghost Story is a haunting, melancholic, ultimately beautiful piece of work from director David Lowery, and cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo’s steady, precise photography on the film is unsettling in the best way. The carefully composed shots highlight the isolation and existential loneliness of Casey Affleck’s central ghost figure, and the fact that there’s very little dialogue and no face on Affleck’s character to play off of makes Palermo’s effective work all the more impressive. Plus, that 1.33:1 aspect ratio! Swoon.

A GHOST STORY
It’s difficult describing a movie that isn’t really driven by a plot, especially when it’s barely driven by characters. As pretentious as this sounds, A Ghost Story is more about a feeling — an emotional response to a singular cinematic experience.
Made on the cheap for $100,000, this Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara film will mostly be remembered for Affleck’s garb — a bedsheet with two eyeholes cut out. While the film traffics in lofty concepts like time, legacy, grief and love, it still manages to make everything feel intimate. This is not a film you’ll forget in a hurry

9. A Ghost Story
One of the film year’s more daring ventures featured Casey Affleck (and some stand-ins) under a sheet traveling through time, his character’s spirit trying to find a way to move through the stages of death and let go. Rooney Mara ate a lot of pie in one sitting—and delivered one of her best performances yet as a grieving wife. Such a beautiful movie.

10) 'A Ghost Story'
An inexplicable and essential experience from David Lowery, who clearly didn’t lower his ambitions after working with Disney on his wonderful remake of Pete’s Dragon. There is a similar wonder to this, his fourth feature, in which Casey Affleck’s distant yet caring musician and husband to Rooney Mara’s homekeeper becomes a ghost who haunts his home as life rapidly goes on around him. Rather than focus on his ability to scare solely, Lowery, who also wrote the movie, plays with concepts of time, loss, and the liberating certainty of not just one’s death but of the death of Earth on the whole. Amidst the ghost’s cosmic travels, he finds a house party where a grizzly middle-aged man (Will Oldham) gives a rousing and hypnotic speech about the end times, suggesting that after the sun goes supernova, even if we’ve found another planet to inhabit and are able to save all our information from destruction, inevitably not only you but humankind will be forgotten. Four movies into what I hope is a very lengthy and prolific career, Lowery has already assured himself a place in film history with this miraculous movie, even if all of his and our work may not live long after.

Tasha Robinson: My favorite movies of 2017 fell into a pretty predictable pattern for me: I love movies that keep me guessing and make me feel strong emotions along the way. Something like A Ghost Story, which is completely unpredictable, but follows its own natural, internal logic, is absolutely my jam, and that’s the kind of film I gravitated toward in 2017.

Julia Alexander: Get Out and A Ghost Story, two movies about radically different things, both left marks on me that carried throughout the year. Jordan Peele’s ability to subvert the audience with an honest conversation about race in America in 2017 couldn’t have felt more timely or necessary. A Ghost Story, a movie about a man’s inability to leave the past behind as he struggles to figure out what’s next for him when he has nothing left, haunted me for months — pun not intended.

8. A Ghost Story
Dallas native David Lowery’s experimental film may be too quiet for some, but good things come to those who wait. It’s purely observational and requires audience participation to connect the dots. But once you discover what’s hidden underneath the film’s sheets, you’ll be glad you took the plunge.

3.) “A Ghost Story”:
The premise sounds like a stupid gimmick. A dead musician (Casey Affleck) wearing what looks like a choir robe — with two large holes cut for the eyes, a la Charlie Brown on Halloween — returns from the afterlife to spy on his beloved wife (Rooney Mara) at their modest home in the Texas suburbs. That’s about it. Pretty dull, right? Ah, but if you hook into writer-director David Lowery’s subdued, melancholic vibe, the film offers up meditations about the passage of time, fleeting mortality and the loss of love that are particularly poignant. It’s truly haunting stuff.

• “A Ghost Story,” director David Lowery’s surreal medication on grief and loss, with Rooney Mara mourning the loss of her husband — played by Casey Affleck, who haunts their house wearing a sheet.

1. A Ghost Story — A wholly unexpected, emotionally haunting tale comes to life
Trying to convince people to watch A Ghost Story by summarizing the film for them is a fool's errand. The husband of a young married couple dies suddenly, then returns to their house as a ghost, appearing just the way you imagined ghosts looked when you were four-years-old—a body hidden under a white bed sheet with two black holes for eyes. The sheer premise of this film should not work.
And yet A Ghost Story has haunted me ever since I saw the film earlier this year. David Lowery's film is sparse, pushing his own penchant to focus on the small moments in between the major events of a story to the extreme. The film is also gut-wrenching. Just say, "The pie scene" to anyone who has seen A Ghost Story and watch them groan like you just punched them in the stomach. Lowery's film requires patience and a willingness to go along with this simple yet absurd concept, taking the audience to the most unexpected places, all while staying in the exact same place. Those who choose to take this journey will find themselves haunted by this film, too—in the best way possible.

Title: A Ghost Story
Directed by David Lowery
Cast: Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara
Movie rating: 9.9
         1. Originality: 10,0
         2. Technical Quality: 9,5
         3. History: 10,0
         4. Performance: 10.0
         5. Mobilizer Character: 10.0
Reason: I confess I did not want to see Casey Affleck at the top of this list. But there was no way Ghost Story could go without the main prize. The feature film is an oniric and brilliant essay on the life and complexity of our existence. At a slow pace but justified, Ghost Story is one of those movies that pound in the head for days and days and days, bringing new visions not only about the film but also about our lives. It is an indispensable film and it undoubtedly deserves its position at the top of this year's ranking.

7) A Ghost Story
It’s easy to dismiss something as sincere as David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, about a white-sheeted spirit waiting out eternity. But I remain firmly in the corner of this graceful film about the timelessness of grief.

“A Ghost Story”: It’s nothing but gutsy to put the lead character of a dramatic feature under a sheet, with ragged cut-out ovals for eyes, for most of the movie’s running time. Writer-director David Lowery doesn’t merely make the grade-school Halloween gambit work — he conjures a haunting meditation on time, love and mortality.

4. A Ghost Story
Casey Affleck is an a-hole. Thankfully, David Lowery hides him under a kooky white sheet with cut-out black eyes throughout the running time of A Ghost Story. 2017 is the year that post-horror was pushed into the mainstream, where jump scares and obnoxious ominous music cues are replaced with existential dread and five minutes of Rooney Mara sitting on the floor, eating a pie. A Ghost Story is a $100,000 art film that works because it truly is scary. Think about this: you die, your loved one leaves you, and you get stuck for all eternity, repeating the course of mankind’s history and reliving all your painful and joyful memories as if they were a movie playing right in front of you. It’s the loneliness that will kill you, and A Ghost Story delivers that kind of horror.

A Ghost Story
If you have not done so already, you'll hear about David Lowery. Because he directed The Lovers of Texas (2013), with Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck. Or because he also directed A Ghost Story (2017), with also Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck - an indie fantasy film with the firm intention to put themselves, for once, in the place of the spirits, without necessarily giving them a an evil personality desperate to scare away the inhabitants of a now haunted house.

10. A Ghost Story
Writer/director David Lowery has crafted a poetic, moving testament to the certainty of time, the inevitability of death and the timeless search for connection. Our vehicle through this existential exercise is the white-sheeted ghost of childhood Halloween costumes. The irony of such a childlike image representing themes so vast and existential seems silly, but only for a few moments, until Lowery’s stationary camera and long, elegant takes wrap you in a strangely hypnotic trance.

3. “A Ghost Story”
Want to reduce anyone to a weepy mess? Show them “A Ghost Story,” which obsesses over the afterlife in such a crushingly beautiful way that it will make you reconsider your place in space and time. While it’s hard to root for a Casey Affleck film in 2017, this is Rooney Mara’s showcase, from an agonizing pie-filled long take to the difficult decisions she makes later on in order to keep living. David Lowery made the year’s best small budget film, and it reverberated long after the credits rolled.