“Whatever hour you woke there was a door
shutting.” Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House
A few minutes
into David Lowery’s A Ghost Story,
couple C (Casey Affleck) and M (Rooney Mara) are woken in the early hours by a
loud crash coming from the living-room of their one-storey, middle-of-nowhere
house. They go to investigate and find….. nothing. So begins a circular,
peculiar story that moves back and forth through time.
C dies on what
could be the next morning, or the next month, we don’t know, because time is
weirdly elastic in this film. C, dressed in a child’s notion of a Halloween ghost,
rises from his mortuary gurney and returns to the house he shares with M. He observes
M grieve, meet a new man and eventually move out. He meets another bed-sheeted
ghost, who’s haunting the house opposite while they wait for someone, but can’t
remember who.
Long after M has
left the house, C continues to haunt it and it’s could be previous or could be
following tenants. Even after the house is demolished and replaced with a luxury
office block, and is surrounded by a neon city-scape, he stays there.
On the surface, the premise of this film is
silly and a bit pretentious. Who wants to spend a couple of hours watching
Casey Affleck wandering around draped in a bed-sheet?
To me this was a
film about two things. 1) Our place in the world and the meaningless of our existence
in the grand scheme of things and 2) The nature of what we perceive as endings.
While C can wander
back and forth through time, he is perpetually stuck in the place he can’t
explain his attachment to, even when he’s alive and M is asking him if they can
move to the city. When M asks C why his pull to the house is so strong, he
says, ‘I don’t know. History?’ We see
some fragments of his home’s sometimes awful history as C time travels to the
years before the house was built.
We can project our
own feelings onto C – our fears that we’re going to die and be forgotten, that
we’ll die without ever doing all the things we had planned to do, that we’re
running out of time, that the time we have left seems to be moving forward at
an alarmingly accelerated pace. M’s fear manifests itself in her habit of
leaving little notes hidden in all the places she lives, explaining that if she
ever goes back, she’ll find a piece of herself there waiting. The note she
leaves in the house she shares with C is what keeps him stuck there, and is key
to his eventual moving on.
There’s strong chemistry between Affleck and
Mara and they convince as an on-screen couple. There’s one scene where we watch
them from above, as they lie in bed and kiss, which feels kind of voyeuristic. This scene ties in well when we later learn that C has also been watching all
the time, could have been there with us at that moment too. We are also allowed
to observe the couple’s relationship as it starts to crumble under the weight
of their different expectations.
 |
| Rooney Mara (M) and Casey Affleck (C) |
There are
moments where good old haunted house tropes are used – flickering lights, books
flying off shelves, cupboard doors being flung open, doors being slammed shut.
I think this was probably because C was doing what he thought a ghost should be doing when they’re haunting
houses; these moments seemed to come when he was upset or distressed (like when
he sees M kissing her new boyfriend.) But because time is so oddly fluid in
this film, he can’t even make the poltergeist style activity happen when he
wants it to – the books fly the shelves too late to scare off M’s new
boyfriend.
I found the idea
of M perpetually haunting a place he can’t escape from overwhelmingly sad, but it’s
a theme that’s at the core of this film; our refusal to let go of things,
people, places, meaningless stuff, and memories. It’s also about what happens
after we die, to those that we leave behind. Everything else just goes on, without you, until they end, too.
I am not an
aspect ratio / camera technique buff, so I am not going to use any technical
terms here. The film is shot in a way that makes it look like an old home
movie, or Polaroid photo – the kind of effect that we’d use filters on phones
to achieve. Because the story is told from C’s point of view, we can only
really see what he can see, or how he’d see it. It’s beautifully shot, though,
with long distance tracking shots and loooong one-take static shots (there’s a
pie-eating scene that feels a bit like one of those extended Family Guy jokes -
I’m pretty sure it’s going to divide
audiences into ‘I get this’ and ‘what the fuck am I watching?’)
The music is
just brilliant, and really fits the mood of the whole film – it’s atmospheric,
creepy, sad and at times uplifting.
A Ghost Story isn’t going
to be everyone’s thing at all. If you’re expecting a straight up chilly ghost
story, you’ll be disappointed. If you like your films a little bit weird and
a little bit unsettling, but ultimately thought-provoking, it will be for you.
Kind of wish I
hadn’t watched it on my birthday, though.
Score: 3.5/5 (I’ve
moved off a /10 rating!)
Dishonourable
mention: Casey Affleck’s legal troubles. Don’t think about that too much, or it
will spoil this film for you.
