Unconventional Romances: A Ghost Story
This is an article I wrote for the University of Exeter’s student newspaper, Exeposé, and appeared in its print edition.
Rather than tackling a relationship head-on, David Lowery’s slow-moving A Ghost Story takes as its focus the afterlife of what appears, on the face of things, to be a steadily imploding marriage. After he’s struck by a car and killed, Casey Affleck’s C, donning the traditional ghostly garb of a pale white sheet, suddenly finds himself supernaturally tethered to the home he and his wife, M, played by Rooney Mara, once shared. At first, then, the film is one about grief, about the way time seems to stand still after the one you love is ripped from your life, but soon it morphs into something else. M moves out, unknowingly leaving C alone to bear witness to the entire history of what was only ever supposed to be their home together. Faced with the sense of smallness that this unending slideshow of life and death inflicts, resignation would appear the obvious response. But Lowery intimates that there’s something more to the world that we must hold onto, that there is something that can fill the silence – that is, all the love we feel and all the pain its absence brings. It’s all those minute pockets of intimacy we struggle so hard to create that imbue life with vibrancy. A Ghost Story is a challenging watch at times, for both its distinct melancholy and testing slowness, but at the same time, I can’t stress enough just how crushingly tender it is.