A Ghost Story : Movie Review

      David Lowery knows that you're probably going to laugh at the sheet. He did too, a little bit, when he first saw it. So did Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara. It's a natural reaction, he says. You don't have to fight it. Get it out of your system. Or don't. There were days on the set of A Ghost Story, Lowery's experimental mood-piece-of-a-movie, where the 36-year-old director would look up and find himself face to face with an adult under a large white cloth with two black eyeholes, expecting to be told what to do, and even he would feel the urge to snicker. 

        And on other days, he'd see a man who, only a handful of months later, would be up onstage accepting an Oscar but who, at that moment, looked like he was waiting for the Great Pumpkin to arrive, and then Lowery had to stifle the urge to cry.  "If I was making this movie with just friends, and not famous actors, maybe I would have felt less pressure," he says, sitting in a conference room in A24's New York office. "But I've got Casey Affleck walking around wearing a sheet, and I don't want him to look foolish. So, you know ..." He trails off for a second, looking forlorn. 

"What was supposed to be something that would take 10 days ended up being the most challenging thing I've ever done," Lowery adds. "And because of all of the things going on under the hood, it also ended up being the single most personal thing I've ever done as well."

It's a testament to the director's vision that A Ghost Story not only gets past the absurdity factor of watching an Academy Award-winning star resemble a toddler's drawing of a spooky specter; it actually succeeds in making this sight one of the most sorrowful, poignant and moving visuals you will see in a movie theater this year, or possibly any year. A largely free-form mediation on mourning that begins with a car accident – the one that shuffles a musician named "C" (Affleck) off this mortal coil and turns his girlfriend "M" (Rooney Mara) into a grief-stricken wreck – and eventually incorporates real-time binge-eating, Blade Runner-esque dystopias and Will Oldham rhapsodizing about the apocalypse into its mix, Lowery's extraordinary work is nothing if not ambitious. But it's the way he uses the ridicule-courting sight of the dead observing a living world go on without them that gives the film its power to break your heart. 

          

"He texted me: 'I wanna make a movie this summer, very small crew. You'll be a ghost under a sheet for most of it. I'll explain later.' I said, 'I'm in.'"
–Casey Affleck

"It's an image that I've loved, that's amused me and confounded me for ages," Lowery admits. "Because it's simple, yet there's undeniably something very haunting about it. And it's actually something I've wanted to put in a movie for a long time." He points to several examples of how artists have used sheet-ghosts in intriguing, disturbing and downright subversive ways, from Patrick Daughters' music video for Department of Eagles' "No One Does It Like You" to the 2010 Spanish movie Finisterrae, which he found inspiring because of "how they took this childlike thing out of the context of Halloween or, you know, a Charlie Brown special and found meaning in it." Lowery borrowed the visual for an animated short he'd done as a sort of exercise back in 2011, and kept the idea of using it for something bigger on the backburner while his career as a writer, editor, cinematographer and director began to take off.

Then, deep into post-production on his 2016 live-action reimagining of Disney's Pete's Dragon, Lowery began to get restless. It wasn't like he was bored working on a large, FX-filled studio film – "Quite the opposite, in fact; I loved doing Dragon," he's quick to point out. But he'd been on the project for close to three years, and felt the need to get back on set: "I just wanted to make another movie, something off the cuff." He recalled an argument that he and his wife had regarding whether to move from Los Angeles to Texas. Then the image of the man under the sheet came back. "Everything just sort of congealed, or maybe combusted, right then," he says. Lowery sat down and wrote a 10-page script about a couple, a death and a spirit tied to a particular house. The next day, he expanded it to 30 pages. I have no idea what this is, he told his producing partners. But I think we should make it in the Lone Star State over the summer.

And partially because he liked the idea of returning to the same place he'd shot his 2013 breakthrough movie Ain't Them Bodies Saints, Lowery sent what he'd written to one of that film's stars, Rooney Mara. "I wish you could see that script," she says. "It read like this incredible short story. But it was scary, because you immediately thought, 'This is beautiful ... but how can you translate that beauty into a movie? Is it even a movie at all?' Then we talked, and he just said, 'Look, it shouldn't take long, we'll do it in Texas and we're going to do this in secret. We're not telling anybody about this in case it doesn't work.' And I thought, Ok, this is beginning to sound more and more exciting."

CULLED FROM : (ROLLINGSTONE)