A Ghost Story

Plot(Spoiler Alert)

A tragic loss separates a married couple. The husband has died in a car crash and is now a spirit. He spends his time being around his wife in their house, but she can not see or hear him.



Blaine: Ever since David Lowery was seven he had been obsessed with how movies were made. He would watch movies on home video and his mom bought him a book on how movies are made. David made a super 8 film called “A Ghost Story”. His brother starred in it wearing a sheet over his entire body and it was about him haunting David’s other brother. David had always loved movies involving haunted houses and ghosts. David Lowery later achieved a career in filmmaking as an adult. He made successful films like “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” and the 2016 version of “Pete’s Dragon”. David had based the idea for “A Ghost Story” on two things. One was making a traditional haunted house movie in which the ghost is wearing a sheet. David and his wife lived in a small house in Texas after they got married. Even though it was small still it was their first house. When they moved it was very sad for David and that’s where the other idea came from. David wanted to make a film that explored that second idea. It only took a few days for David to develop a script for “A Ghost Story” and it was only 30 pages long.

David was re-united with actors Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara after working with them on “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”. David wanted to make “A Ghost Story” with his friends and Casey and Rooney were close friends to him so he contacted them saying he was going to make a weird little movie. David felt that “A Ghost Story” should be a secret project that only his friends would know about. Rooney and Casey thought that would be fun so they were in. “A Ghost Story” was shot in Texas around the same area David’s first house was. David Lowery said that Daniel Hart's music score was very important for “A Ghost Story” because there is hardly any dialog and a silent movie like this needs something the audience can listen to while they are watching. “A Ghost Story” wasn’t meant to be a romance, but David loved seeing Casey and Rooney together and he wanted to see more shots of them together.

Casey Affleck wanted to be underneath the sheet through out the film and no one else. At one point another guy had to wear the sheet because Casey’s ghost character goes back in time and sees himself when he was still alive. Playing a ghost was an easy job for Casey Affleck because the ghost hardly talks or moves. A lot of the time he is just standing still while observing what’s going on around him. A lot of the time David would try to figure out how the ghost should move in the film. In the script the ghost would move a lot, but then David realized that the ghost worked better in stillness so he reduced the amount of movement. The ghost would move just slowly. Casey’s character sees another ghost next door that is a female. David had the ghosts communicate through subtitles because he said no one really knows how ghosts communicate to each other. They are both waiting for something, but the thing is they don’t know what it is. The female ghost is waiting for someone, but doesn’t know who it is because time has gone by so quickly that she can hardly remember who it is.

“A Ghost Story” is like a silent movie because there is hardly any dialog and the cinematography shots are all in a square frame. One of the things about “A Ghost Story” is that it’s about seeing these moving images. There’s a scene that focusses on Rooney Mara eating a whole pie in four minutes and the reason why she is eating an entire pie is because she is in grief after loosing her beloved husband. That pie scene just kept going on and on and I asked myself if it was ever going to stop. Rooney Mara had never eaten pie before she did “A Ghost Story”.

Everything around Casey’s character is going by at a fast pace. Rooney Mara’s character moves out of the house, then a Mexican family moves in and Casey scares them away by throwing stuff around. Then the house is torn down and a skyscraper is being constructed where it used to be. He is alone in the world. There was a ghost that lived next door that he would communicate with, but after the place was torn down, the other ghost felt it was time to move on. Casey goes to the top and jumps. It takes him back to the 19th Century and then he sees himself from when he was alive to when he died and became a ghost. There was a note Rooney Mara’s character left inside one of the walls and Casey’s ghost tried to get it out to see what it says, but he never got it because the house was torn down. But after he travels back in time he gets a second chance at getting that note. Whatever is on the note it frees Casey Affleck’s character so he can move on to the afterlife.

My rating on “A Ghost Story” is four and a half out of five stars.