For Reel

Director: David Lowery

For a film about the fragility and swiftness of existence, A Ghost Story often moves with a self-conscious malaise—it is a story of stillness and watching, and in the case of the ghost of a musician (Casey Affleck), this practice is seemingly played out over doomed centuries. The pacing nicely contrasts the fact that people often speak of the rapidity of life, and yet even a minor bout of depression feels absolutely endless. Director David Lowery’s long takes are the film’s biggest point of controversy—Rooney Mara grief-eating of a pie plays as more of a stunt than convincing character building—and yet the audience’s uneasy awareness of the film’s temporal qualities are key to establishing the film’s pulse. Similarly, if Will Oldham’s monologue regarding the futility of maintaining a legacy feels a little on-the-nose, it is not so much what he is saying that is the point, but the fact that he is saying it in the first place. The human awareness of time and its inevitable stopping are the chief concerns of the filmmakers, and Affleck’s ghost spends his time in the film not only reckoning with that fact, but watching others deal with it in the wake of his passing. Lowery’s aestheticism sometimes feels too rigorously objective to satisfy his sentimental tendencies, but nonetheless the final twenty minutes of the film are its most touching and quietly beautiful.