The ghost in question is Casey Affleck's character, credited only as "C." His partner, "M," is played by Rooney Mara. They live in a one-story house, and don't seem to be particularly happy. The film spends a few minutes with them before tragedy strikes, and C is withholding, brusque, and self-centered. Lowery shoots these scenes like, yes, a horror movie; obscuring the actors' faces, keeping relevant information in the background of the shot, and extending shot durations well beyond the point of discomfort. A long take of M pulling furniture out to the curb prowls from left-to-right until it's nearly unbearable.
Compounding the tension is an apparent haunting in C and M's home; one night they hear something strike C's piano, but when they go to investigate … there's nothing there. Soon afterward, C dies in a car accident right outside the house, and wakes up in the morgue some time later as a ghost. This comes as a small mercy, because Casey Affleck's marble-mouthed bleat of a voice is unbearable and the ghost never speaks.
The film otherwise grinds to a halt here. Lowery abandons tension, understandably — the Bad Thing has happened. C is dead. But tension, which Lowery was adept at conjuring, is replaced by a sort of preciousness, which the film utterly fails to sell. The shot of the ghost appearing in the morgue, as the shape that was C sits upright on the slab, is one of the film's endless, skin-crawlingly extended takes. Again, this technique fills the first movement of the film with dread. Without dread, it becomes purely, obnoxiously indulgent, as if straining to prove a direct correlation between shot duration and profundity.
Lowery is no Béla Tarr, or Tsai Ming-liang, whose 2003 Goodbye, Dragon Inn was similarly concerned with the permeable barrier between life and death. He obviously knows these reference points, but A Ghost Story never amounts to anything but imitation. DP Andrew Droz Palermo (You're Next) is hemmed in by a squared 1.33:1 frame, complete with daguerrotype-round corners, reduced to framing everything in très-A24 #aesthetic rule-of-thirds compositions. Lowery's feints at cosmic significance come off, perhaps inevitably, as baby's first Terrence Malick — where Malick grandiosely contrasted a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story with, uh, the Big Bang, Lowery forces us to follow the specter of onscreen-and-IRL asshole Casey Affleck through hundreds of years of human history.
Our Masshole Virgil is a literal blank slate, and after an hour of watching an actor draped in a sheet look at various things in the frame the thudding stupidity of the conceit overwhelms the film — did Lowery not trust his actors to convey the implicit presence of a lost loved one? Lowery doesn't even let Mara provide an emotional anchor, which prevents us from identifying either with her grief or the ghost's unmoored journey through space and time. They are both ciphers, down to their single-letter monikers. Mara is ferreted away before the halfway mark, after an excruciating Long Take where she devours a pie because she's sad, or something. The lack of specificity turns these shots into stunts. Ironically, despite keeping a signifier of death onscreen at all times, A Ghost Story can not even evoke the gravity of losing a partner, to say nothing of the wild overreach in the second half of the film.
Lowery stages a scene later in the film where a man at a party (musician Will Oldham, of course credited only as "prognosticator") unveils a long, moronic speech about how in the cosmic sense nothing matters because it's all cycles of death and rebirth and death. This dime-store nihilism is actually borne out by further scenes of the ghost chilling in a vaguely cyberpunk future and bearing witness to the slaughter of a family of white settlers by whooping offscreen Native Americans. Incidentally, this is the third time POC figure into the plot; first is a young black boy who gawks at C's car crash, and the second is a Latinx family who bears the brunt of the ghost's anger.
Credit must be given to Daniel Hart's score, which contains several powerful motifs, notably an unresolving climb and fall that effortlessly evokes impermanence and yearning in all the ways the rest of the film doesn't. Hart arranges his pieces smartly, building from chamber strings to monolithic choral crescendos. But the less said about the cornball electropop that Affleck leaves behind for Mara, the better.
In the end, Lowery struggles to tie things off in the manner of Chris Marker's seminal 1962 La jetée and all its time-traveling reality-colliding children (Terry Gilliam's 1995 Twelve Monkeys, Rian Johnson's 2012 Looper, Chris Nolan's 2014 Interstellar); a climax about inevitability and the ephemeral and, in this case, the boneheaded stubbornness of cismen. There is some devious glee in watching the ghost watch his corporeal form be a total dickhead to M; the mysterious piano plunk from the opening is revealed to be the ghost's doing, as it heavily, unsteadily collapses under the full weight of its shitty boyfriendness.
The damage is done by this point; what should be a tremendously emotional climax fails to generate any spark. The idea that ghosts linger to see if their loved ones will ever return is sad as fuck, but we don't know who these people are. We can map ourselves onto their blankness, but the trick of loss is that you can never understand it from the outside. M's grief is her own particular wound and the film allows us no way in through the manicured cinematographic preening . C — well, C should have been a better person while he was alive. Maybe that's the lesson here.
Lowery uses Virginia Woolf's brief "A Haunted House" as a motif, and it's worth reading in full. In less than a thousand words Woolf's lucid, direct language effortlessly describes the entire arc of A Ghost Story. A ghostly couple wander their former home, finding remnants of the light that animated their life together in every corner. These ideas course under the surface of A Ghost Story — but of course they do. Like the white-sheeted ghost, life, death, love, and loss are elemental. It doesn't take much to prod the audience into contemplation of their own mortality. To do so in such a resolutely oblique, featureless way may as well be an accident.
This article appears in Jul 13-20, 2017.