Nightmare Fuel 2017 Day 29 – A Ghost Story

Time to get spooky, kids.

I remember when A Ghost Story came out, the only marketing for it that I saw was the poster, which featured a ghost in the vein of the Maitlands: a dude in a sheet.  Classic.  And with M’Lady Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck starring, the enticement levels were off the charts.

I had no idea what I was getting into.

What story we have centers around Affleck and Mara, a couple moving into a new house and basically starting their lives together.  Unfortunately, Affleck is unceremoniously killed in a car crash, leaving him to haunt the house as the sheet-draped spectre.  More a meditation on loss and grief and so forth, the film shows how death can linger and how lives can be affected thereby without even knowing it.

Gotta say, I wasn’t a fan of this.  The stars are mostly wasted, Affleck reduced to the sheet for the majority of the film, complete with no spoken dialogue (he occasionally communicates … telepathically? … with another ghost), and when he is shown as the man, he’s restrained, eternally pensive.  Clearly there’s some love between the couple, but what we see is mostly strained or awkward.  Director David Lowery, of Pete’s Dragon remake fame (they actually financed this film with the profits therefrom), makes the understandable decision to opt for longer shots, what with the meditative and elegiac tone and approach, but many of these scenes stretch far too long to be effective:  Most famous (from the reviews I’ve read) are a scene with the couple snuggling in bed (at one point, you think it’s actually gonna wind up turning into an out-of-place sex scene, considering they had just checked their house for intruders moments prior, but nope) and a one-take scene of Mara grief-eating an entire pie before our eyes (and we see every bite, dammit — turns out it was a vegan chocolate-flavored pie, and Mara hated it, likely aiding in making the subsequent vomit shot more believable).  The pace is purposefully glacial, but, like in the aforementioned scenes, the point is reached far before cuts are made, making for a rather frustrating sit.

I will say that the physical framing is interesting, consisting of the screen being cropped into a rounded square reminiscent of projector slides, but the cinematography can’t help the rest of it.  It’s all just too slow, too meandering, too navel-gazy to elicit much enjoyment.  I’m sure there are plenty who can relate to the emotions on screen, but the presentation surely limits that number.  Needless to say at this point, I was certainly disappointed.