A pensive dichotomy hangs over David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, much like the heavy white bed sheet covering its protagonist. In a year drenched with passivity, reflection, and far-reaching feelings of helplessness, it felt right to revisit this work three years after its release.
This film is vast in its simplicity and quietly grand. In some ways, it’s true that its narrative can be summed up with just a few words: it is the story of a house and the ghost who haunts it. But instead of lingering in the familiar tropes of its high concept premise or lounging in the archetypes of its gothic cinematic forebears, it sets out for something else.
A man, denoted in the credits with just the initial C, leads a calm life with his partner in their rural home. Our moments spent with the couple are sparing and ambiguous: we watch as they lie silently with one another, stroke the other’s cheek, listen to music. These wordless, seemingly random flashes in time are rendered intimate and vulnerable. Lowery uses extended, idling camera shots that make us feel as though we’re witnessing something we shouldn’t. The square aspect ratio lends the film a voyeuristic quality, like we’re peering in, passively, from another world.
C perishes in a car accident early in the film. Returning as a ghost (and cloaked in the sheet used to cover his body) he becomes a fixture of time, space, and memory in the house he shared with his wife. He watches her life play out and the hundreds of years that come after, unwilling—or unable—to to relinquish his grip on the place.
The image of the ghost is, understandably, hard to digest. We’re met with a strange, almost humorous affectation of a lost soul. The childlike ghost garb of a simple sheet thrown over the head is immediately recognizable and initially off-putting in its obviousness. However, as the film wears on, its blend of sadness and strangeness breeds effective pathos. We perceive the ghost’s emotions through the drape and movement of the fabric, which darkens and dirties throughout the film. C looks upon a world in which he exists and does not exist, able to interact only by observing. The story oscillates between moments of passivity and immense, violent grief–all of which we experience through the eyes of a non-participant. The audience bears sole witness to his anonymity, his powerlessness. And we’re made to feel as if we, too, are haunting every frame.
In a pivotal scene, C crosses paths with another ghost, gesturing to her with a soft, sad wave through the window.
“I’m waiting for someone,” she says.
“Who?” he asks.
She replies, “I don’t remember.”
A Ghost Story is forceful because it speaks loudly with very little. Lowery, with $100,000 and 90 minutes, responds to the literature of ghost stories while asking us to participate in one.
For many, 2020 has surely felt like its own kind of ghost story, yielding trauma like formless, apathetic phantoms in its wake. At its core, this film speaks to that sentiment, though Lowery never could have known it at the time. His cosmic meditation on loss and love reminds us of the forces that bind us to moments in time, spaces of nameless and bottomless grief, past the point when we forget who we are.
A Ghost Story was produced by A24 studios and is available to watch on Netflix. You can watch the movie trailer here.