If the sight of newly-minted Oscar winner Casey Affleck scurrying around with a bedsheet over his head sounds more like a farce than deep-feeling cinema, then feel free to skip A Ghost Story. If, however, you want to see what writer-director David Lowery (Aint Them Bodies Saints, Petes Dragon) can do with nothing but unfettered imagination and an abiding faith in the possibilities of movies, then trust us: This is a poetic and profound experiment you do not want to miss.
Affleck plays a musician identified only as C; Rooney Mara plays M, the woman who shares a Texas house with him until hes killed in a head-on collision. Rising from a table at the morgue, C shows up back at the place that held his happiest and most painful memories except now hes a ghost in a near-comical sheet with cut-out holes for eyes. He watches M grieve she cant see him and, a scene that seems to last forever (its just four minutes), observes his rail-thin girlfriend gobbling down a pie until she vomits. C tries to embrace his lady love in her bed; she cant feel his touch. When another man enters her life and kisses her in the doorway, C knocks books off shelves.
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Eventually, M moves out can you blame her? The apparition doesnt follow; its the house that holds him. So he stays and watches as their home is sold and resold, watching as others occupy it. Lowery switches back and forward in time from pioneer days to the age of skyscrapers while maintaining the same location. The effect is transfixing.
Thats the movie. No action. No budget. No special effects. Oh, C does wave to a ghost he spots haunting the house next store, and he keeps trying to dig into a wall to find something M left there. But theres no conflict. The Transformers crowd, hoping for violence or horror, will bolt for the exits in the face of such nonstop stasis Lowerys influences run more to Terence Malick and Thai master Apichatpong Weerasethakul than Michael Bay.
Alternately child-like and artful, A Ghost Story holds you in thrall get into Lowerys rhythms and the movie will touch you deeply. Mara has always been expert at expressing emotions without dialogue, and Affleck is a master at it Manchester By the Sea proved that indelibly. Having worked with Lowery on Aint Them Bodies Saints, both actors are simpatico with the lyrical cadences of his technique; their minimalist performances are, in a word, mesmerizing. The evocative camera work of Andrew Droz Palermo, as the paths of these characters fold into a dream, adds to the power of this hypnotic and haunting film. Youve never seen anything like it.
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