A Ghost Story (2017)

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.

9. 'A Ghost Story'
David Lowery's strange little movie starts out as a love story, gives way to suspense, and finally blossoms into an enigmatic and highly expressive evocation of time, place, collective memory and history, given extra aesthetic ballast by a squared-off frame reminiscent of family photo albums. Plus, Rooney Mara eats a pie. So there's that.

3 / A ghost story makes of a ghost story an incredible sensory poem about our impotence in the face of the inexorability of things, on our condition of point of dust in the fatality of the world. David Lowery cares for one moment Malick, Gondry and Jonze to finally emerge with beauty.

19'A GHOST STORY'
DAVID LOWERY
History of fantasmas that transcends the genre to reflect on the genres of romanticism: love, la pèrdua i la mort. The formal ambitio, the esthetic preciosisme and the masterful way of playing in l'espai i the temps do not entelen the seva emotive potency.

A Ghost Story (David Lowery)
Its title, which predicts a horror movie, hides in reality a very beautiful and hypnotic poetic melodrama. This story of a dead musician who returns as a ghost to remember all his life is one of the most fascinating stories about oblivion. The protagonist's spiritual connection with his past leads us to a meditation on memory, disappearance, sadness and the supernatural world that has conquered all those open to participate in the experience.

8. ‘A Ghost Story’
Yes, this film co-stars Casey Affleck. And yes, some will find that a problem. Thankfully, he spends most of the film covered in a white sheet—a man who, after perishing in a car accident, awakens in the morgue as a ghost and proceeds to haunt his Texas home, as well as his heartbroken wife (Rooney Mara). What sounds terribly silly on paper proves to be a bold, poetic meditation on love, loss, and mankind’s pursuit of serenity. And Rooney Mara is absolute dynamite. You’ll never look at a chocolate cream pie the same way again.

Rooney Mara Devours a Pie—Her First Pie—in A Ghost Story
Great year for fruit, great for pastry at the movies. In A Ghost Story, an utterly bereft Mara copes with the death of her husband, played by Casey Affleck, by consuming a pity pie delivered to her home by a friend. In a long, long, (long), looooong, [LONG] take, Mara devours the entire chocolate-cream pie, underscoring the vacant, dead-eyed feeling that can come after a profound loss—gorging is a way to feel again, the pleasure of taste, the pain of an upset stomach, the sheer fullness of a belly full of pie. According to Mara, this was the first pie she’d ever eaten in her actual life, which is a contender for most improbable, lightly upsetting, and frivolous celebrity story of the year.

Most Unique: “A Ghost Story”
An unexpectedly touching film, “A Ghost Story” seems on the surface to have an almost silly premise. Casey Affleck spends 90 percent of the film’s runtime underneath an actual bed sheet as the titular ghost. But those barren black holes that represent the endearing ghost’s eyes translate into endless heartbreak, as the unnamed ghost eternally waits for his love, who is played by Rooney Mara, to return to him. Effectively utilizing sound — and lack thereof — to embrace the melancholy of the afterlife, “A Ghost Story” is a quiet, sentimental film reflecting on what it means to have loved and lost. I cried. And I don’t cry.

2. “A Ghost Story”
Despite experiencing its magnetism over six months ago, “A Ghost Story” directed by David Lowery stood the test of time and came away as what I consider to be, one of the best films of 2017. Now, if you have seen “A Ghost Story” for yourselves, you would know that it’s an incredibly acquired taste. For starters, Rooney Mara eats an entire pie for what seems like forever and Casey Affleck’s ghostly presence strolls around with a bed sheet ladened over his body for almost the entirety of 92 minutes. Of course, the film is very slow and it’s difficult to grasp exactly why this is the case. But as the film lingers along, you soon realize that this is not a traditional film, but more of an ethereal performance art piece. In this regard, the cosmic, untethered energy brimming from the film’s 4:3 framing initially challenges, but eventually eases its way into your heart and floors your emotions once you realize its thematic balladry. Keeping this in mind, “A Ghost Story” is not only about mourning, but is about human existence, time and genuine love that transcends it all. “A Ghost Story” embraces its own absurdity, demands the patience of its viewers, yet rewards with sublimity, and if you can endure a slow yet meditative paced atmosphere and existentialism, you will come to realize why “A Ghost Story” is such a necessary viewing. While it may be small in budget, lacking in substantial dialogue and in plot conventionality, David Lowery’s indie success makes up for it in emotive power. It tests one’s patience, but rewards with an earth-shattering resolution to the plot’s cosmic deliberation, resulting in an experience detached from the confines of reality, a feeling few films gave me in 2017.

3. A Ghost Story (David Lowery)
With a plot device so simple and such a large part of the film being dialogue-free, this somewhat atypical supernatural tale could have ended up as flimsy, insubstantial as its designated narrator/observer. That it managed to be among the most expressive and exquisitely moving pictures of the year is thanks to Lowery’s extraordinary grasp of the human condition: our fear of oblivion, curiosity about life after death and inability to comprehend the transience of our very existence. Fearlessly translated for the big screen, it’s a transcendent meditation on time and how it might be the greatest mercy that we, along with our memories, love and regrets, one day would all go poof like a cosmic sigh and simply disappear.

1. David Lowery’s A Ghost Story.
To be perfectly honest, I went in suspecting that I’d be agreeing with Bilge Ebiri’s assessment, that “its what-the-fuckery feels more calculated than organic.” The suspicion wasn’t immediately tossed, either; it evaporated slowly. I don’t know what it is that’s emerged in its place, but it’s got a hold on me still. When Will Oldham’s character launches into his monologue, he’s probably not exactly sure where he’ll be going with it, but a hunch in his gut guides him to a desolate conclusion. Lowery’s story rolls out as if he were thinking out loud, and though it also eventually wanders out to the very infinitude of the universe, he ends up in far less desperate straits. There can be such a thing as a ghost of a ghost. Learn that there comes a time to let go. Michael Koresky at Reverse Shot: “The draped figure, scratching the walls as it seeks a possibly unattainable answer to his own little life’s question, is as elemental an image as any in recent American cinema, possibly even more resonant than Lowery could have intended. This film’s ideas are so maddeningly simple that they touch the profound.”

12. A Ghost Story
Toying with the traditional iconography associated with movies about restless spirits and the places they haunt, David Lowery’s materialistically mischievous, and altogether mesmerizing A Ghost Story does something very different as far as cinematic hauntings go.

Reuniting with his cast from Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (2013), A Ghost Story’s prologue introduces us to a married couple (including a brilliant Rooney Mara in a subdued and understated performance). We intentionally never learn too much about the two (not even their names) beyond only the broadest of strokes; he wants to stay in their newly acquired ranch-style bungalow and she wants to move out of it.

After becoming fleetingly familiar with the rhythms of their marriage and some snapshots of their biography, an offscreen car crash robs the man of his life and he’s soon a specter, draped only in a hospital sheet, haunting (though unable to interact much at all) his home and his wife. After a time, his grief-stricken bride finds the fortitude to leave the home they shared and go on, but he cannot.
An offbeat ghost story succinctly coupled with an unreadable one about love that, through obfuscation, is all about attachment, memory, and longing. A Ghost Story is an odd, artful examination of love, life, and death as glimpsed through crudely snipped eyes in ethereal linen.

8 - A Ghost Story
When I first walked out of A Ghost Story last summer, I was fairly certain I hated it. Then, by the time I got home, I was pretty sure I loved it. That’s the wide gamut your reactions will run as you take in his meditation on life, death, and loss. In putting star Casey Affleck (and probably a stand-in as well) under a sheet for much of the runtime, silently walking through various tableaus, writer/director David Lowery has made a film that stubbornly, defiantly dares you to stick with it all the way through the end, but when you do, you may be surprised at the emotional journey you’ve been on.

A Ghost Story
I didn’t see a more realistic depiction of grief in 2017 than Rooney Mara eating too much pie. Director David Lowery followed up one of 2016’s best family films (Pete’s Dragon) with 2017’s most heartbreaking with nothing more than a bed sheet draped over a silent Casey Affleck, whose ghost ambles around the home he shared with his wife (Mara) before his death in a car accident. In death, Affleck’s musician character has time to go over every mistake he made, every time he wasn’t present for the woman he loved, and he discovers grace in the process. He may not be able to make up for his actions (or inactions) in the afterlife, but he can be with his wife as a silent companion even long after he’s gone.

14) A Ghost Story
Director David Lowery filmed A Ghost Story in secret, then premiered it at the Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim. The movie starts out being about a grieving widow (Rooney Mara) trying to live through the pain of losing her beloved husband, but it soon shifts focus to the ghost of her husband (Casey Affleck, covered in a sheet), evolving into a compelling rumination on the nature of time, memory, history, and the universe. Bathed in warm humor and wistful longing, it’s a film that stays with you long after it’s over, a lingering reminder of the inextricable link between love and place.

6 - A Ghost Story: Allegations of Casey Affleck's bad behavior have probably harmed the film's award prospects, but David Lowery's fine Polaroid-framed meditation on what it's like to be without being perceived is still raw and beautiful.

A Ghost Story
Digital technology allows filmmakers to conjure supernatural creatures in increasingly sophisticated ways, like director David Lowery did with 2016’s Pete’s Dragon. In 2017, Lowery got up to something a lot more analog, which probably sounded like a joke when most people first heard the concept. A Ghost Story is Lowery’s contemplation on the state of purgatory in which a soul finds itself after death, but his ghost is like something you’d see on Halloween; essentially, it’s a glorified sheet with two holes for eyes. Casey Affleck walks around in that sheet, unseen for the balance of the movie, watching Rooney Mara as she mourns him. And then, when she eventually moves on with her life, he continues to watch the future occupants of the house, haunting it in ways more and less demonstrative, searching for some kind of resolution that will allow him to pass on to the next plane of existence.
Lowery also departs from his simple setup in profound ways that shouldn’t be spoiled. Dialogue is an afterthought in this moody consideration of the core human desire to leave a mark on the people you shared life’s journey with, and the world in which you journeyed. It wrestles with the way time moves for us, hours sometimes seeming to take an eternity, years sometimes flashing by in instants. It’s about the futile attempt to assign meaning and permanence to something as essentially ephemeral as human existence, but neither is it despairing about the ponderous realities it explores. It’s one of the most unusual, one of the most creative, and one of the very best films of 2017. –

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.

7. A Ghost Story (David Lowery)
Ask anyone to describe David Lowery’s latest film and they will mostly say: Rooney Mara ate a pie and Casey Affleck spent most of his time under a white sheet. And yet, this is a film where everything happens. It’s a history of humanity, an essay on literal soul searching, and one of the most romantic works of the past few decades. At the risk of making the cheapest of puns, it will haunt you forever.

5. A Ghost Story (David Lowery)
A Ghost Story was a very intimate experience for me. As such, I am focused less on pure craft or structure than I am interested in feeling, and how these elements aid those feelings. A Ghost Story moves like a dream; unhinged from time, or perhaps linked so intensely to its motions as to rearrange a human conception of its passage, it is both seductive and crushing. Beneath its towering meditation of loss and its unshakeable association with life lies a deceptively simplistic dramatic question that, when answered, collapses the fabrics of the film beautifully into itself.

1. A Ghost Story (David Lowery)
The psychological weight of our certain death and the fact that life will go on long after we are departed is difficult to convey visually, but A Ghost Story is one of the most poignant films to ever grapple with this issue. It’s a singular feat of enthralling storytelling that I would say is going to leave a lasting impression centuries after everyone involved has passed away, but as Will Oldham (aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy) ponders in David Lowery’s micro-masterpiece, humanity will eventually perish. It’s not a comforting thought, to say the least, but A Ghost Story leaves enough room for the viewer to find peace in the reflection.

Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara
After playing an outlaw couple in David Lowery's 2013 Ain't Them Bodies Saints, Affleck and Mara reunited with Lowery to play another couple in A Ghost Story, in which Affleck's character, sporting a simple ghost costume, haunts Mara's character after he dies.

4. A Ghost Story
A Ghost Story is oil on canvas, needing only a pair of eyes and an open heart to haunt all who will allow it. Director David Lowery keeps the dialogue to a minimum, summoning the hypnotic authority of raw emotion, pinpointing the trappings of a lost love on both sides of death. Lowery wisely re-ups on a previously developed chemistry between Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, the stars of his breakout feature Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. Affleck’s screen time as a human is brief as his character transcends into a white-sheeted, dreary-eyed ghost after his unexpected death. The ghost is an acquiescent presence whose shapelessness epitomizes loneliness and torment yet at the same time gallant, albeit impractical, determination. Lowery cracks open the megacosm of love and drenches his world with its fixings. His reconnaissance of the affections of ‘the other side’ is brave and Malick-ian; teeter-tottering between hopelessness and the carte blanche of freedom. Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palmero’s mix of speeds, Mara always shot in 24 frames per second while Affleck’s ghost was shot in 33, compounds his spectral illusion that the couple could occupy the same room while residing in separate worlds. When combined with his use of the classic Academy aspect ratio of 1.33:1, A Ghost Story oozes nostalgia that adds to its layers of sentiment. Be patient with A Ghost Story. Allow it to hold your gaze and you will find yourself completely possessed by its artistry as its images move off of the screen to hover in your psyche.

2. A GHOST STORY
If I could, I’d tie this one for number one of the year. And for most of the year, it was my number one. Such a confident movie. As someone who has made movies, I envy to a painful degree director David Lowery’s confidence. It’s the story that seems beyond silly in a pitch meeting, but it works. Wow, does it work. And the the film’s beautiful structure. So unconventional and tells college professors with their three-act rules to shove it. Time passes in waves and we go to each new life with sways of conversations. Beautiful, woderful, haunting, creepy. Just a masterpiece.

A Ghost Story
A Ghost Story is one of those films that lingered with me long after I left the cinema. The clear-cut intelligence and audacity that it took to make this occasionally absurd, yet ethereally poignant and moving tale of love, loss and loneliness, points to serious mettle on writer/director David Lowery’s (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) behalf; so much so that you can’t help but sit up and take notice of him as a filmmaking powerhouse. The intimacy and authenticity in the relationship between Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara is exceptionally acted by the two of them, though Mara has the bigger part and pulls off the finest performance of her career. But my favourite side of A Ghost Story is in how the director represents the timeline of the ghost’s life. Nonlinear is not a strong enough term and yet Lowery even dips into time travel without completely befuddling the viewer. Throw in some deviously subtle humour, a great soundtrack/score, awesome cinematography with intricately long and wide shots and some great detail in the production and you have one of the finest studies of grief that you’ll see in the cinema. 

Best Film Character - C (A Ghost Story) - So, how does a character that doesn't speak, has no face and, essentially, doesn't really exist take the top spot here? Well, if you've seen David Lowery's profound A Ghost Story, you'll probably understand why. Through wordlessness, we watch C's ghost roam his house after his death as his girlfriend grieves him and, eventually, moves on. We sit by his side as he's forced to endure an unbearable loneliness as new people come and go, his world changing around him by the minute, unable to leave himself and step outside. His old home becomes his only world, lost in time, and spending this experience with the C's ghost is really rather unforgettable indeed.

Saddest Moment - "I Don't Think They're Coming" (A Ghost Story) - After C's ghost has roamed his house for a while, and watched his girlfriend grieve his loss before moving on and moving out, he sees another ghost trapped in the house opposite him. They communicate for a while, although we're not quite sure how - no words are exchanged, but subtitles translate their broken glances to tell us that this other ghost is waiting for someone. Some years later, which pass like minutes for C and for us, we come across the other ghost again, now stood in the rubble that once was her home. She tells C that, whoever she's waiting for, she doesn't think they're coming anymore, and just like that her sheet drops to the floor and she ceases to exist for ever. There's nothing overwhelmingly emotional about it in the moment, but what it represents and the way it says it may just haunt me forever.

10. A Ghost Story
A well-shot meditation on love, loss and death, A Ghost Story hurts. The ghost of a recently deceased man (Casey Affleck) returns home to reunite with his heartbroken wife (Rooney Mara). Hidden under a sheet, Affleck’s character watches his wife grieve, mourn and move on. Untethered to time and unable to communicate, his ghost remains in the couple’s home, waiting and watching.
David Lowery’s film may seem straightforward, but its quiet, beautifully composed images leave us contemplating the meaning of life. The movie’s haunting long after its final moments.

13. A Ghost Story
My Favorite Moment: As much as I want to say it’s the scene where Rooney Mara eats an entire pie in one take, my favorite scene in this hauntingly beautiful movie is its final scene. Much like Personal Shopper, A Ghost Story is about loss and grief, but reaches a cosmic scale unlike any other movie I can remember. I know liking a Casey Affleck movie may be #problematic, but David Lowery’s film is so exquisitely well-crafted that I can’t not love it. Plus, Kesha is in this movie, you guys. Kesha!

Texas Independent Film Award: A Ghost Story
Each year the HFCS [The Houston Film Critics Society] also recognizes one feature shot in the state for the Texas Independent Film Award (TIFA). This year the honor goes to David Lowery’s A Ghost Story starring Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara which was filmed in the Dallas area.

1. A Ghost Story     David Lowery’s mediative look on life and death partially deals with grief, and how one deals with the death of a loved one. The film is about a couple, C (Casey Affleck) and M (Rooney Mara), who live together in a small house in the American outback. When C dies, he returns to the house as a ghost (played by Affleck with a white sheet covering his entire body…) and watches over his wife.

In a scene of mourning, we watch M sit on the kitchen floor and eat a huge pie for more than 5 minutes straight before rushing to the bathroom to throw up. The ghost of C slowly appears in the frame as the camera pushes towards M. The scene is simple in conception, and a little absurd, but works brilliantly as a look at grief.

It’s emotional and haunting; and the sort of scene rare to see in a modern film, even if it’s an American indie. It brings to mind something that Ingmar Bergman, Béla Tarr or Andrei Tarkovsky would put on screen. Mara’s subtle performance is powerful and moving, and Lowery calls the scene the proudest of anything he’s ever directed.