A Ghost Story

t all began with a bedsheet. director David Lowery has said he’d envisioned making a film featuring this rudimentary ghost costume long before he began working on his fourth feature. It’s also this image – the mute, sheet-clad figure, with two holes for eyes – which has remained lodged in our minds in the months since Lowery’s strange, supernatural love story was first released. And ultimately, this may be what saves A Ghost Story from the stain of Hollywood’s ongoing sexual harassment scandal. The sheet makes it sometimes possible to forget that Casey Affleck – an actor who has settled two claims out of court – is the man underneath.

Affleck is there in the early scenes though, with Rooney Mara, his co-star from Lowery’s 2013 breakthrough film, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. They play “C” and “M”, a young married couple with easy chemistry who argue sometimes (M wants to move house; C, a songwriter, wants to stay put with his piano), but mostly live in undramatic harmony. Then C dies in a car accident, dons the sheet and returns home, where he waits, becoming a witness to his wife’s grief.

But eternity is a long time, even in a 92-minute movie, and after M eventually moves on, the ghost lingers, as if unsure of what comes next. It’s one of the film’s successes that we are often equally uncertain. He watches as a single mother moves into the house that was once his, then scares her children with some petty poltergeist trickery. Another set of tenants have a party and he listens as a guest persuasively holds forth on the futility of all human endeavour. Later – or perhaps earlier? – he observes a pioneer family pitching camp on the same spot.

Through all this, the sheet places inspired limitations on Affleck’s acting repertoire. He’s forced to rely on a few, pared-down gestures to convey emotions as subtle as “that feeling when you realise you, and everyone you love, will one day be a rotting corpse”. He succeeds, partly because the blankness of the white sheet encourages us to project something of ourselves, augmenting the story’s general sense of wonder with an intimate emotional depth.

Just as the couple’s bungalow sits within the vast expanse of underdeveloped Texas, so each striking image is allowed space for contemplation. Most memorable is M slumped on the floor by the fridge, eating an entire pie in real time. Just that, in one long, extended sequence, which pushes beyond absurdity into poignancy and then profundity.

This isn’t the only quirk of Lowery’s editing . he also eschews the slow dissolve and the fade in favour of using hard cuts to mark the passage of time. These cause us to question our perception of past and present and is every bit as effective as acknowledged time-travel classics such as Interstellar or Groundhog Day. This ghost story isn’t scary in the usual sense, but it haunts us all the same.