“Out of all the movies I saw in 2017, A Ghost Story was hands down the most original. The premise seems simple: a couple live in a small house that the husband is more attached to, but then he dies in a car accident. He comes back as a ghost who watches his wife continue to live her life. Where it goes from there is utterly unpredictable and leads to an ambitious, contemplative, existential film on life and time's impact but ultimate indifference to it.
“The most noticeable aspect of A Ghost Story is writer-director David Lowery's audacity to depict the ghost as someone in a sheet with two holes cut out for the eyes. It's a reference to a very different time - the 19th and early 20th century. Back then, in an allusion to burial shrouds, the bed sheet ghost made for an easy, inexpensive Halloween costume. Today, such a depiction brings an element of absurdity and comedy since the costume has been satirized in everything from Charlie Brown to Scooby Doo to E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Regardless that a bed sheet ghost has never looked more elegant than here, Lowery playing it perfectly straight creates a Brechtian dissonance through the audience always being aware of the deliberate artifice. Brecht wanted to avoid too much emotional identification with his characters to allow for conscious critical evaluation for the viewer. Such identifying with the character is further debilitated by watching a ghost with no facial features here. That one can't help but feel for the ghost anyway is a testament to the power of Lowery's filmmaking.
“Lowery also chooses to shoot in a square 1:1 ratio with curved corners. That's a reference to an earlier, more quaint period of photography, further calling attention to a story set in the present seen through the lens of the past. And so is time a central theme of this story. The immense expanse of time covered might seem to lessen the meaning our ghost is seeking when it foregoes the chance to leave this plane of existence. What is one person's attachment to another or to a house in all of that forgotten memory? (Note that the main characters all go nameless.) Or perhaps the flood of time actually makes that struggle for meaning all the more powerful for what it's struggling against, the vastness of eternity. A Ghost Story is not a horror movie and it's never really scary, but its power is still haunting.” ~ George Wu
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