To some viewers, the first half of David Lowery’s A Ghost Story will challenge them to stay awake. A couple, in the midst of arranging a move, is torn apart by the untimely death of one of them, known only as C (Casey Affleck). He then returns as a ghost, a figure wearing a white sheet with black eye holes, to haunt his grieving love, M (Rooney Mara). He stands silently to watch her cry, kiss another man, and, yes, eat a whole pie in one sitting.
Long shots are filled with sparse action, and Lowery chooses to rest his static camera on quiet intrusions into M and C’s privacy, unaware they’re being watched by either us or the ghost. When our couple is stirred from sleep by a bump in the night, we then watch as they curl back up, settle back into each other’s embrace, breathe on each other’s faces as they slip back into unconsciousness. We’re admitted into a painfully intimate moment and none of it is cut for our convenience.
Once the ghost watches his love drive away, bags packed, and it’s revealed his spectral form is tied to the house and not her, the pace of the film picks up, drifting through a series of vignettes showing the house’s subsequent inhabitants and what will come of the land he once called home. Time, something we thought we had an abundance of as we pored over elongated moments, now starts to outpace us, with seemingly every turn of the head or camera cut years pass our paranormal friend by. The thundering realisation bears down on him and us: the ghost is not the centre of this story.
Neither is his partner, and neither is, by extension, their love. The ghost is sidelined in his own haunting, stuck to the walls he resides in even after they’re torn down. He’s an invisible, intangible witness to an indifferent, rapidly shifting world, unable to influence or comment on the changes that relentlessly pile onto a space he once thought his presence was crucial to. He doesn’t really know what’s happening to him.
At first glance, Lowery’s film seems to have an unfeeling thesis; people will forget you and inevitably move on, you will be lost to time, everyone is equally unimportant. Life is just a biological process we get quite invested in. But rather than dismissing the love between M and C as something cosmically irrelevant, Lowery makes an affecting argument about what binds us all to life in the first place.
The ghost’s existence is predicated on not letting go. He is leftover love, a self-propagating anxiety of being left behind, but by not understanding the way time moves relentlessly onward, he’s only making his experience of being out of sync with the world worse. What aches the most about the first half of A Ghost Story is knowing how much the ghost wishes he could submerge himself in those tiny, intimate moments of love again, stretch them for all they’re worth, never turning away — but not until he accepts they’re over can he be free.
For all his confronting exposure to the uncaring majesty of time, what ties the ghost to that place comes from an internal, personal place. We often hold onto how other people make us feel because we think we can’t find love like that again, or can’t provide it for ourselves. More than that, we can accept love but we find it harder to admit that it’s over. Very few of us have made our peace with the fact that the people we care about can find a way to live without us. It’s not our fault. No one’s to blame. It just happens.
In the ghost’s simple, expressionless visage, you can see his brain trying to make sense of what’s happening around him. His peculiar vantage point gives him access to ruminate on what his life, love, and death all mean, but realisations of that calibre are still too much for one little ghoul to comprehend. It would be for anyone. So he doesn’t think big, he thinks small. As the world shifts around him, he scratches at the paint to recover a note M hid in the walls before leaving the house. Maybe it’s a message for him, more likely it’s just the last imprint she can make on his life now that he’s dead. It won’t make C’s life more meaningful, it won’t make their love the most beautiful and powerful in the world. But it’s a tiny piece of proof they were there at all, one that only they have access to. She hid it, he found it.
The moments in A Ghost Story that may feel taxing for some viewers — the long shots of a couple sleeping, being forced to watch M eat a whole pie out of grief — are exactly what Lowery wants us to pay attention to. The audience’s disinterest in these private moments is irrelevant. To the people experiencing them, they’re everything. Who we love, where we belong, the meaning of our existence shouldn’t be defined by those looking in, we should decide them ourselves. In the end, none of us are cosmically important, none of us have a higher purpose and no one is destined to be remembered for all of time.
So if we find someone who makes us forget that, isn’t that the point?
