A Ghost Story | Review - An offbeat but eerily memorable supernatural tale

(Image credit: © Scared Sheetless, LLC. All Ri)

It's all about time.

This decidedly odd art-house movie is far from a conventional tale of the supernatural. Even if it does feature that stereotypically spectral figure of a ghost in a white sheet with cut out eyeholes.

Writer-director David Lowery (maker of 2003’s Badlands-style outlaw romance Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) is taking a big risk with this unblinkingly cartoonish Halloween image. Remarkably the gambit plays off. This is an achingly sad and haunting story of love and loss.

The man beneath the sheet is Casey Affleck’s C, who is lingering on the site of the blissful life he enjoyed with wife M (Rooney Mara, like Affleck, a co-star of Ain’t The Bodies Saints) before it was cut short by a traffic accident. The film’s minimalist drama and slow pace requires patience. Give it time, though, and A Ghost Story proves eerily memorable.

Certificate 12. Runtime 92 mins. Director David Lowery

A Ghost Story debuts on Netflix on 7 July. Available on Blu-ray, DVD & Digital from Lionsgate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_3NMtxeyfk

A film critic for over 25 years, Jason admits the job can occasionally be glamorous – sitting on a film festival jury in Portugal; hanging out with Baz Luhrmann at the Chateau Marmont; chatting with Sigourney Weaver about The Archers – but he mostly spends his time in darkened rooms watching films. He’s also written theatre and opera reviews, two guide books on Rome, and competed in a race for Yachting World, whose great wheeze it was to send a seasick film critic to write about his time on the ocean waves. But Jason is happiest on dry land with a classic screwball comedy or Hitchcock thriller.