A Ghost Story (2017)

Casey Affleck is the specter at the center of "A Ghost Story."

"A Ghost Story"

⭐⭐⭐

Written and directed by David Lowry, “A Ghost Story” features a young couple, played by Casey Affleck and Roomey Mara, living in a modest, one-story house in a sleepy, nondescript suburb close to Dallas. We don’t learn much about them and they don’t say a whole lot, but the laconic lovebirds gain our affection, as they snuggle up adoringly in bed, waking only to check out mysterious noises coming from the piano in the living room.

One day, the soft romance is abruptly shattered when Affleck is killed in a car crash at the end of his own dusty, gravel driveway. They say most accidents happen close to home, but really? Mara goes to the hospital to identify her husband’s body—in an excruciating, subtly powerful scene that notably avoids the usual maudlin trappings—taking one last look before gently covering his head with a sheet.

As Mara walks despondently out of the hospital morgue, Lowry keeps his camera still at the end of the room and—in one of the movie’s several striking visual gestures—holds the shot of Affleck’s lifeless body for several moments, suggesting the dark, horribly incomprehensible, infinite stillness of death.

Startlingly and almost comically, the stillness is interrupted when Affleck’s corpse wakes up and slowly walks out of the room; his sheet suddenly appearing with two black holes for eyes, as if a live-action Charlie Brown finally figured out the scissors and finished his Halloween costume.

Invisible to the living, Affleck’s ghost journeys across town and back to his small house to look in on his grieving wife. Lowry films a devastating, unbroken shot of the couple with Mara sitting silently on the kitchen floor eating a whole pie until it makes her sick, and Affleck’s ghost watching from the edge of the frame—one is a figure seemingly caught between worlds, the other is so deep in sorrow that food no longer has taste or meaning.

Mara finally moves away from the site of her painful memories; however, Affleck stays behind, roaming around the empty house each day as if it were a sad tomb. Time passes, people move in and out of the house, months and years of their lives seemingly unfold in a flash, time no longer feels linear.

Not much happens, but what does is sometimes strangely funny, sometimes mournfully poetic. One family moves away after Affleck pulls a haunted house stunt (a glass of milk floats in the air, dishes crash to the floor); another hosts a wild party featuring a somber, long-winded monologue about memories and death; Affleck looks out the window and begins communicating with a female ghost next door, a sign that there are yet more lost souls in the world.

“A Ghost Story” begins as a tender romance, slips into a quiet tragedy, has notes of suspense, thriller, horror and even comedy before finishing, rather uncertainly and unsatisfyingly, as a peculiar sort of supernatural, time-travel fantasy.

Still, “A Ghost Story” is highly compelling, particularly in the first half, as an achingly painful contemplation of loss. Lowry’s extended takes and long stretches without dialogue make this increasingly ambitious movie seem distinctly small and minimalist, like something plucked from the silent era.

There’s been nothing else quite like it for a long time, and that’s saying something.