My Favorite Movies: A Ghost Story (2017)

If I were to sit down and write an analysis of David Lowery’s A GHOST STORY, it might very well be in the works for at least at year. As much as I love it’s strange, challenging, bizarre narrative, I am nowhere near being able to totally understand it. It is so aloof and strange and unhinged, much like the unexplained mysteries of the afterlife itself.

The story goes like this: a man and a women (Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara) move into a small house down in Texas. Shortly after they settle in, he dies in a car accident. As his widow is mourning, he wakes up and walks out of the morgue, not as a zombie but as a ghost covered in a white sheet like something off of a greeting card. In this state, he spends the rest of the movie, visible to us but invisible to everyone else in the movie. Wandering back to his house, he is forced to watch his widow grieve him, and then sadly move on with her life, up to and including selling the house, which he himself cannot leave.

But that is, really, only about 5% of the story. The ghost watches the entire evolution of that house, as new occupants come and go and he tries to make sense of the long passages of time and the endless predicament of which he seemingly cannot escape. Days become weeks; weeks become months; months become years; years become decades; decades become centuries until he thinks he has reached the end of mankind only to . . . well, I’m not really sure. Did human-kind start over?

A GHOST STORY has stayed on my mind ever since I saw it at The Sidewalk Film Festival in 2017 and varying positive and negative opinions have flopped back and forth. The movie works on me in the way that all great films do – it’s a mystery without a key, much like life itself. Why is this ghost hanging around? What is the afterlife? Is it merely a state of observation? Is there something we are required to do before moving on. Is this purgatory? Some punishment? A transition. This is a fascinating and sometimes frustrating film but wholly original film that explores the idea of an afterlife but doesn’t ebb toward an answer.