A Ghost Story (2017)

November 13, 2017 10:50 AM

In this singular exploration of legacy, love, loss, and the enormity of existence, a recently deceased, white-sheeted ghost returns to his suburban home to try to reconnect with his bereft wife.

AV Club: A Ghost Story may haunt you, even if you think the ghost looks silly (A-)

Vulture: "... But even at its most self-conscious, there’s something lovable about A Ghost Story. Lowery’s boxlike frame deepens the poignancy, and he evokes the passing of days, months, or years with real lyricism."

NY Times: ‘A Ghost Story’ Has a Sensitive Specter With Time on His Hands

posted by jazon (7 comments total)

It's very much a solemn meditation on grief,and I liked it.

That said with Casey Affleck's reputation I am unlikely to recommend it to people.
posted by graventy at 2:02 PM on November 14, 2017 [1 favorite]

Agreed. I think about David Lowery, who among other things edited Upstream Color and is probably most responsible for it working as well as it does, and then I remember that Casey Affleck is kinda his muse, and I'm like "Ugh."
posted by infinitewindow at 5:03 PM on November 14, 2017

That said with Casey Affleck's reputation I am unlikely to recommend it to people.

I feel the same way, and it's a god-damn shame because I really liked this movie. Meditation on grief, yes, and thus/but also being stuck in a place/in life/emotionally (not just ghost-Casey Affleck but living-Casey Affleck as well who does not want to move) and thus life just moving past one. It made me reflect my own life quite a while after finishing the movie.
posted by bigendian at 6:09 PM on November 14, 2017 [1 favorite]

I was vaguely looking forward to this until all the abovementioned came to fore, so, yeah, that's a shame.
posted by turbid dahlia at 1:47 PM on November 19, 2017

Watched this earlier tonight..

I liked how quickly the glowing door to heaven disappeared. It was kind of perfunctory; I imagined a voice like, "We know you aren't gonna come through, but don't say we didn't offer!"

I loved the music in this, the slow scenes, the time jumps. It felt like it was almost a good movie, or the movie it almost was was good.

I did not like the weird white nationalist hipster undertones. The childless white couple is replaced by a Spanish-speaking single mom with her two kids, and he smashes their stuff in rage to scare them off? But he's not gonna smash the beer can into the face of the nihilist monologuing unrotoscoped Waking Life dude? Our ghost goes back in time to when the first white people show up, they're cute and sympathetic, the little girl hides a note under a rock as if to draw a line between this first white girl on the land and Rooney Mara's character? Then they get murdered by off screen Indians? I'm not saying it felt deliberately ethnically white, just extremely unexamined.

Even putting aside that stuff, what's left seems slight. Beyond grief, it did invoke ideas about being frozen in time. For awhile I was hoping it would reflect M's feelings about C being stuck in time and place; when someone you love dies, they stop growing in your memory, they don't move forward with you. It didn't really support that idea much though. It seemed to want to be a movie about a hipster dude's quest to get his manic pixie dream girl's dropping out of the moulding.

I loved the way this movie told its story, but the actual story it told seemed not good.

Kinda like Swiss Army Man, come to think of it. Surreal movies about basic white people. Upstream Color had a tiny bit of this undercutting basic-ness (Walden? Really?), but the rest of it was smashed so open with weird trauma surrealism it was okay.
posted by fleacircus at 10:55 PM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]

Man that monologue about the heat death oh the universe was a real eye roll to me. I went in really expecting to like this but it didn't click at all for me. Glad some people were able to click with it, and I did like the visuals at times and the way it was framed, but I'm not feeling the meditation aspect.
posted by Carillon at 6:58 PM on February 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

This movie could have used some more development and input from people who weren't white men. Interesting story telling techniques, admittedly.

As for the monologue from the guy in the overalls, if I was at a party and heard someone holding forth about his tedious view of human existence the way he did, I'd leave. As it was I thought he'd never shut up and I was seriously considering trying to cursor past his role.
posted by orange swan at 8:17 PM on February 26, 2019 [2 favorites]