A Ghost Story (2017) — what it means to outlast everyone you loved
David Lowery put Casey Affleck under a sheet and made one of the most serious films about time and grief that American cinema has produced in twenty years. It works if you have lost someone. It bores you if you haven't.
The premise of A Ghost Story (Lowery, 2017) is as simple as anything in American independent film: a man dies in a car accident in front of his house. He wakes in the hospital morgue, under a white sheet with two eye-holes cut in it, and walks back home. His wife is there. She cannot see him. He watches her grieve. Then she leaves. Other people move in. The house changes. The neighborhood changes. The ghost stays.
That last sentence is the film. Not the grief — the staying. The ghost does not haunt anyone in the conventional sense. He does not rattle chains or open doors. He stands in rooms and watches. He waits at a window. When a neighbor leaves a note in the wall of the kitchen, he tears at the plaster with what appears to be desperation, though it is also unclear whether ghosts feel desperation or whether the film is projecting backward from the shape of the gesture. The film is careful not to tell you what being dead is like. It shows you what it looks like from the outside.
Time as antagonist
The standard horror or grief film has an antagonist you can name. The monster, the illness, the accident, the absence. A Ghost Story is unusual in that its antagonist is time — specifically the mechanism by which time continues past the point where it has any relationship to the life that organized it. The ghost does not age, does not move on, does not stop experiencing time. Time moves past him at an accelerating rate. The film's structure enacts this: scenes that last minutes give way to sequences of years compressed into a cut.
This is not new as a formal strategy — Terrence Malick has been doing versions of it for decades — but Lowery applies it to a specific emotional experience that most films do not take seriously: the experience of not being able to leave a place after you have lost your reason to be in it. The ghost is trapped not by supernatural mechanism but by attachment. He cannot go because there is something unfinished, something left in the wall. The note. He does not know what the note says. He will spend the rest of the film trying to find out.
The pie scene and the question of whether it earns its runtime
Approximately thirty minutes into the film, Rooney Mara eats a pie. She eats it at the kitchen counter, standing, having just received it from a neighbor after the funeral. She eats it slowly. She does not stop. She finishes most of the pie. The ghost watches from across the room. The scene runs approximately seven minutes.
The scene has been discussed at length — in reviews that call it the film's most important moment and in reviews that call it the film's most self-indulgent one. Both reactions are reasonable. What the scene does, formally, is two things. It establishes the film's commitment to observed duration: you will sit with this grief for as long as it takes, not for as long as is comfortable. And it shows grief's actual texture, which is not cinematic. Grief is pie at the kitchen counter at 2pm on a Tuesday. It is not a beautiful shot of a woman crying in a window. The beautiful shots come later, and they are earned by the pie scene.
Lowery has spoken about this in interviews. In a conversation with RogerEbert.com, he described the scene as "the film's argument about how grief actually occupies time." He is right, and the scene is not too long for what it is doing. It is exactly long enough. If you find it boring, the film has told you something about your current relationship to this subject matter. Come back to it later.
Who the film works for and why
The film's A24 release in 2017 found two distinct audiences. The first was the slow-cinema audience — viewers who had worked through Malick, Akerman, Tarr, and were receptive to a formally patient American film. The second, which was larger and less expected, was people who had recently lost someone. Reports of audiences weeping at the pie scene came from screenings. The film was described on social media in terms that were less about its formal qualities than its accuracy: "This is what it is like."
The film works for the bereaved because it does not lie about the timeline. Grief does not resolve in ninety minutes. It does not conclude with a lesson. It continues past the end of the film's frame, past the end of the house, past the end of the city, potentially past the end of time. The ghost's final realization — when he reads the note, which contains a message that the film declines to share with the audience — arrives in a context where almost everything familiar has been obliterated. The realization does not redeem anything. It releases something. The distinction matters.
The film does not work for everyone. If you have not lost someone, or if you are not in a state where the subject of loss is live for you, A Ghost Story will likely be slow in a way that does not pay off. This is not a failure of the film. It is the film correctly identifying its audience. Some films are seasonal in a personal sense — they have a viewing window that is determined by where you are in your life rather than when they were released.
The formal ambition
Lowery shot the film in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio — approximately square, rather than the widescreen formats standard in contemporary cinema — with rounded corners on the frame, like an old photograph or a home movie. The choice is not nostalgic; it is spatial. The narrower frame makes the ghost's presence more claustrophobic and more domestic. He fills the frame in rooms in a way he would not if the frame were wider. He is constrained by the architecture of what used to be his life.
The score, by Daniel Hart, uses a recurring motif based on a song — "I Get Overwhelmed," written and performed by Dark Rooms — that appears diegetically in the first act and then returns transformed through the film. It is the kind of score that does not call attention to itself until you realize you have been inside it for ninety minutes. This is the right kind of film music. A24's production notes include Lowery's own account of how the song became the film's emotional anchor.
The film page is here. Watch it when you have the evening for it. It asks for attention and returns it. The devastating and slow-burn collections on this site have its neighbors.