There have been many great movies made in the past few years, but none that I’ve seen reflects as comprehensive an act of creation as does “A Ghost Story,” from the director and screenwriter David Lowery. It is a simple story of a house and its haunting: a young couple, played by Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, live in a small house in semi-rural Texas. (Their characters are not named throughout the film; in the end credits, the woman is called “M,” the man, “C.”) Early in the film, he dies in a car accident; after she observes the body in a hospital morgue, the young man rises in the form of a classic, nearly parodic ghost—a white sheet with two eyeholes. He leaves the morgue, returns to the house that he shared with the woman, and takes up residence there. This narrative hardly seems stocked with sufficient incidents to fill even a short film. But under the direction of Lowery, whose previous films include the historically resonant modern Western “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” (which also starred Mara and Affleck) and the tender, tactile remake of “Pete’s Dragon,” “A Ghost Story” is a quietly grand romantic mystery, a metaphysical vision of love that is inseparable from Lowery’s wildly inventive yet controlled way with the very stuff of movies: movement, performance, space, time, light, color, reflections, effects, talk, sound, and, for that matter, silence. The film, which pulls an epigram from Virginia Woolf’s story “A Haunted House,” is a jewel-like novella written directly onto the screen in images.
“A Ghost Story” ’s fiercely audacious originality is on view from the start, before any ghosts make their appearance. When C and M sit together, yet apart, in the sparely furnished living room, each using a laptop computer, Lowery uses the simplest of devices—focus, keeping C sharply in the foreground and M in the background—to suggest the distance of intimacy, a vague self-absorption that will, of course, eventually become clearer. Soon it’s apparent that a change is about to happen, because M is doing a major cleaning, which Lowery captures in a single ingeniously conceived and deftly realized image: a tilt of the camera down from the sky to a house sitting on a broad swath of unkempt grass. The camera tracks horizontally as M drags a chest laboriously from the front door of a small one-story house, toward the camera, as it passes at a tightly measured lateral glide from one side of the bare path to the other; she deposits it curbside with a pile of other garbage, and the camera then reverses course. The simple movement of the image along with that of the woman is “unmotivated,” which is to say that it’s not done to follow her movement, to emphasize her particular gesture, or to reveal any additional narrative details. It makes the moment feel as if it has its own distinctive identity and, moreover, makes each of the elements of an apparently unified frame burst forth in its own disparate identity.
The multiplicity of elements in a single frame—the seeming miracle of things being together in the same time and place—is one of Lowery’s decisive visual themes. When the couple is together in bed at night, a seeming slam of the strings of the pair’s upright piano by an invisible visitor leads to a twilight prowl that Lowery again controls with precise focus and delicate shadow. When they return to bed, the result is an exaltedly intimate nuzzle in a single shot that has a tightrope walker’s tensely thrilling uninterrupted duration. (Lowery’s control of time throughout the film is exquisite.) The interruption comes with another image, in daytime, of the front of the house; Lowery pans very slowly from it toward the street, where two cars sit silently, having catastrophically crashed; one of them contains C, who is dead. After M goes to the morgue to observe the body and leaves, the sheet rises with a jolt and then makes its way, seemingly invisible, through the hospital. The ghost passes in silence through vast fields and eventually reaches the house. Existing in an alternate realm of time, the ghost also has a tempo of its own, a phlegmatic, nearly shuffle-like glide that seems to temper the tempo of the entire movie—as if the movie itself were haunted, inhabited by this practical, ever-so-slightly yet overwhelmingly comical, silent ghost, who’s invisible and inaudible to the living.
That’s where the pie comes in. A real-estate agent named Linda (Liz Cardenas Franke) comes into the house, under the ghost’s watchful gaze; she leaves a pie for M, along with a note about showing the house, and she leaves. In a cut, M arrives and finds the pie; she begins to eat it while standing at the table—and finishes almost the entire pie while sitting on the kitchen floor, and then dashes to the bathroom to throw it up, all while being watched by the ghost, who’s there in the frame along with M but invisible to her. The scene has become the object of absurd critical quibbles and complaintsthat suggest, above all, the narrow range of directorial creations and the limited sense of imagination to which many critics have become conditioned.
Yes, M—which is to say Mara herself—eats nearly a whole pie in the span of two shots that run for about five minutes. And, yes, there’s both a psychological simplicity and a psychological vagueness to the action, suggesting both that grief is mind-bending and that people are weird. (Many critics seem to expect action to be mapped with a screenwriter’s index-card facility onto specific character traits.) But M’s increasingly frenzied pie-eating is far from the only thing that’s going on in the scene. There are M’s small gestures as she stands at the kitchen sink, opens the garbage can, goes through the mail. There is the changing afternoon light on the kitchen wall. And, as she digs with increasing vehemence at the pie, there is the ghost standing in the background, looking impassively at the woman he loves, whose suffering he has caused but whom he is unable to comfort. Though the action is of a one-line-screenplay simplicity, the images seem alive with the impingement of a world of nature and personal connections, of impulses and memories, in a single, pain-streaked but nearly comedic astonishment (Lowery’s alertness to the ordinary sounds that embody the existential weight of the gestures of daily life—the little noises M makes as she opens the foil, the sound of the fork clicking against the bottom of the glass plate—is surpassed only by that of Robert Bresson.)
The romantic mystery and supernatural wonder of “A Ghost Story” emerges from careful observation matched by freewheeling speculation; the movie’s dramatic power is inseparable from its hushed, sensuous splendor. There are heart-stopping moments of near-contact between M and the ghost of C, intricate reflections that render the ghost’s invisibility all the more poignant, flashbacks and recurrences that echo with the touch of the uncanny. One of Lowery’s grandest creations is the ghost-C’s silent conversations, in subtitles, with the ghost next door, which reveal that the fundamental role of ghosts is to wait—to return home and wait—as if making the impossible demand that the living do the same. A ghost is a diminished thing, both invisible and, seemingly, dulled and narrowed, enduring solely to see the lover left behind; the horror of a house’s haunting is ghostly wrath at a sense of abandonment by a lover who dares to move on, ghostly envy of happy people, ghostly resentment of newcomers who usurp the sacred space of lost love. Ghosts in the film, who take the age-old form of children’s-costume ghosts, are like overgrown children, reduced to primal emotion. Their sense of place, their attachment to the site of their former home, has an obstinate, childlike earnestness—hence the harrowed, perturbed, and fragile innocence of the ghostly gaze, which Lowery brings out in images capturing the slow, determined, frozen gestures of the ghost of C (Affleck under the sheet).
Lowery daringly advances time throughout the film in cuts (he edited the film, too), and the leaps ahead in time are matched by audacious shifts in space (ones too good to spoil), by way of architecture and urbanism, leading the ghost to contemplate a modern office tower in various stages of construction as well as the spectacle of city life that’s on view from its heights. (There’s also a daring and historically informed leap back in time, provoking a spiral of time that’s also too delicious to spoil; suffice it to say that afterlives connect joltingly with pre-lives.) After the ghost C chases a happy family out of the house where he’s awaiting M’s return, other people take their place: apparent art-world adults who hold a party at which a barroom philosopher (played by Will Oldham) delivers an extended, bombastic monologue about the futility of creation in the face of the ultimate destruction of the universe. The ghost’s silent contemplation (and dramatic response) and, for that matter, the entire film itself, is a refutation of that materialist point of view. “A Ghost Story” provides its own supreme and cosmic justification: what Lowery films, with his rarefied fusion of style and subject, is the existence of the soul.
