A Ghost Story is not like anything you’ve seen before

IT MAY feature Casey Affleck draped in a sheet with two eyeholes cut in it, but this is about as emotionally charged a cinematic experience as you can have.

IT’S difficult describing a movie that isn’t really driven by a plot, especially when it’s barely driven by characters.

As pretentious as it sounds, A Ghost Story is more about a feeling, an emotional response to a singular cinematic experience.

It takes guts for a filmmaker to sideline cinematic conventions and create something so ambitious and yet small, as David Lowery (Pete’s Dragon) has done here. Lowery funded the project himself on a micro-budget of $100,000, recruiting friends and collaborators he knew, including Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, both of whom he previously worked with on Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. And it started with a draft screenplay only 10 pages long, before being fleshed out to 30 pages within the week.

A Ghost Story will probably be remembered as the movie in which Affleck spent 90 per cent of his time draped in a bedsheet with two eye openings — a more graceful version of the classic Halloween costume — but that wardrobe choice never feels like a gimmick. It’s just the first reason this is unlike any other spectral tale you’ve seen before.

Musician C (Affleck) lives in a simple weatherboard house in a suburban/rural area with his wife M (Mara). One night, the two are woken up by the sound of something crashing onto their piano but find nothing when they go to investigate.

David Lowery made the movie for $100,000. Picture: Bret Curry/A24 via AP

Affleck and Mara immediately establish a remarkable chemistry between the lovers, made all the more important when, within five minutes of the opening, C is killed in a car accident outside their house. When M goes to identify his body at the morgue, she pulls the sheet over him and leaves the room. But the camera doesn’t. After a minute, the sheet stirs and the ghost of C rises. He wanders the halls of the hospital before a doorway of light materialises in front of him. But he doesn’t step through. Instead, he returns to the house he shares with M and watches her as she grieves and lives her life, over days, weeks and months.

As an audience, we don’t know how C experiences time. For us, some moments play out in real time — like the mesmerising minutes-long sequence of Mara crouched on the kitchen floor eating pie — and other moments whiz past in a blur. C also sees through the windows of the house across the way a fellow spirit who can’t remember who she’s waiting for.

Casey Affleck’s ghost costume never becomes a gimmick. Picture: Bret Curry/A24 via AP

Time (and timelessness) is a meditative presence throughout A Ghost Story as C meanders around his house — time and our emotional connections to a single place, the pull and anchoring effect a single space can have on us.

A Ghost Story is framed in an instamatic-y way that makes it seem as though you’re watching it through a Viewfinder, at times with an almost sepia tone, reinforcing the timelessness and nostalgia that pervade the film. There is a simultaneous sparseness and richness to its aesthetic.

What binds A Ghost Story into a whole is Daniel Hart’s incredible score — the soundtrack is well worth a listen on its own. Hart’s music oscillates between tender strings and grand orchestral pieces that imply a cosmic significance, in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey, on the most mundane set pieces.

There’s a haunting quality to the film, though not in the way you’d expect from a movie about a ghost, as its emotional resonance threatens to overwhelm.

While A Ghost Story traffics in lofty concepts like time, human legacy, grief and love, it still manages to make everything feel intimate, as if it were speaking to you and only you, and that is the magic in its poignancy.

This is not a film you’ll forget in a hurry.

Rating: 4.5/5

A Ghost Story is in cinemas from July 27.

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