A GHOST STORY (2017)

11/9/17 - A Ghost Story (2017) - 7+/8-/10 -

Languid and meditative, but a gloriously quiet cinematic beauty. It is graceful and penetrative, engaging mind, body, and soul. It is so secretive and solemn, but whispers truths and emotional depths as heavy and engaging as the loudest theatrical piercer. Haunting is obvious, but its presence within your thoughts and heart is lasting and undeniable.

It is methodically sparse and spartan, focusing on a standing sheet, a distant gaze, and the small facts that make up an everyone. It quivers while clutching at that deep clawing breath of time, speaking to a rarely accumulated scrutiny of existence. It fills itself with malignant moments of mourning, in the living and the dead. The sheet standing as the barrier, metaphorical and literal, between worlds was striking.

Much of the film was filled with the remarkable in the mundane, liking making a sheet with holes magical. There is a delicate and purposeful score. It’s always highlighting distinct moments but melting into the background for just the right "haunting" resonance. Every song chosen is pitch perfect and resonant. Every pie bite, flick of the light switch, shift in the shadow, or forgotten speech means so much.

As contemplative as it is there is a slowness and blankness. "Purposeful", granted, but still listless and unbound. Open-ended and structured to unshackle could leave some dangling or drowning in waters of anarchy and meaninglessness. I was under its influence, but I could see this just not connecting and being considered “artsy fodder”.

I was moved by its active nihilistic approach, instilling each moment and man with their own purpose, untethered to a larger cosmic or cosmological narrative. Those actions and observations derive "meaning" in what we put into them, not a dogma or ethos. A melancholic but hopeful delineation on time, meaning, art, hope and love. It was affirmational and tragic, which I found beautiful and moving.