Simple, powerful emotions can be summoned that way, and it’s those sorts of emotions that are this movie’s specialty. He must instead approach the character as if he were onstage in a play where gestures are more important than words, and try to convey surprise, sadness or anger by holding his head and shoulders in a particular way, or turning quickly instead of slowly to look at something.īut this opens up a different kind of relationship between character and viewer: we’re projecting ourselves onto C as we might as children playing with dolls or stuffed animals. The sheet denies the film’s leading man most of the tools he’d normally use to communicate emotion. The movie’s two most fascinating formal traits are its decision to keep C under the sheet for much of the film’s running time, and the way it moves its story along with hard cuts rather than dissolves, fades-to-black, or other signifiers that a lot of time has passed. C stays rooted to the spot where he died, as if he’s stuck in the “denial” phase of the grieving process. At a certain point the house gets leveled and replaced by a gigantic luxury condo-hotel type of development. He stays in the house as new tenants move in, including a single mother ( Liz Franke) and her two children (Carlos Bermudez and Yasmina Guiterrez) and some young, single people who throw parties with lots of bohemian artist-types. C dies in a car crash early in the story but continues to linger on as a ghost, silently observing his wife’s grief and her eventual exit from the home they once shared. C (played by Casey Affleck) is a musician who lives with his wife M ( Rooney Mara) in a small house surrounded by undeveloped property somewhere in the vast flatness of Texas. The characters are so archetypal that they don’t have names, just initials. The film is a ghost story, in the sense that there’s a ghost in it, but it’s also many other things: a love story, a science fiction-inflected story about time travel and time loops, and a story about loneliness and denial, and the ephemeral nature of the flesh, and the anxiousness that comes from contemplating the end of consciousness (provided there’s no life after death-and what if there isn’t?). I didn’t know anything about it going in, except that its main character was a person who dies and spends the rest of the movie walking around mute, wearing a white sheet with eyeholes cut out of it. This tale of a man who dies young and lingers around the property where he and his wife once lived is bound to be one of the most divisive films of the year. There are no spoiler warnings after this because as far as I’m concerned, everything I could say about this film would constitute a spoiler. So I’m urging you in the first paragraph of this review to just see it and save this review for later. David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story” is one of those movies. I rarely see a movie so original that I want to tell people to just see it without reading any reviews beforehand, including my own.
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