A Ghost Story

David Lowery wrote and directed A Ghost Story, a 2017 release that reduces the supernatural to a white bedsheet with two eyeholes and then asks what that figure might feel across decades. Casey Affleck plays C and Rooney Mara plays M, a couple living in a small Texas house. C dies in a car crash early on and returns as a silent observer, unable to leave the property or make himself heard. The film runs 93 minutes in a 1.33:1 frame, and much of it passes without dialogue.

The budget was about $100,000, with the cast working for scale. A24 gave it a limited U.S. release on July 7, 2017, four months after its Sundance premiere on January 22. It grossed $1,929,659 worldwide. Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo shot long static takes in natural light, and Daniel Hart's score circles a repeated piano figure. Lowery had directed Pete's Dragon for Disney the year before; this one was made on the leftover scale of that career.

Reviews were mostly strong: 91 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 84 on Metacritic. Audiences were cooler, with a 72 percent RT audience score. The film's reputation since has settled around its formal choices, the sheet, the frame, the loop, and its refusal to explain the rules of its own afterlife. [edit]

A couple lives in a modest house outside Dallas. The film calls them C and M, and for the first stretch it shows only the texture of their life: a disagreement about whether to move, a hand on a piano key, the sound of a car pulling into the driveway. Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara play these scenes with almost no dialogue. Lowery holds the camera still and lets the rooms do the talking.

C dies in a car crash. At the hospital, M identifies the body. Then C sits up on the morgue table, still covered by the sheet, and walks out. The sheet has two holes cut for eyes. Nobody sees him. He goes back to the house.

What follows is a vigil. C stands in the living room while M eats a pie on the floor, cries, and eventually brings another man home. He watches her pack and drive away. He cannot touch her or speak. Once, he makes the lights flicker, and that is the extent of his poltergeist career.

The film then stretches time. New tenants arrive, a Hispanic family with a young boy. C watches them too. The house is eventually demolished and the land redeveloped into a high-rise. Through all of it C remains, sheeted and silent, tethered to the property. He meets another ghost in a neighboring house, also sheeted, who has been waiting for someone who never came. The film does not explain the rules of this afterlife. It only shows the waiting.

Lowery keeps the frame boxy and the takes long, so the audience feels the years pass at the same rate the ghost does. The question the film keeps asking is simple: what is a ghost waiting for? The answer is not given here.[edit]