A GHOST STORY

Aficianados of the horror movie will hate "A Ghost Story" for this tale of a lonely ghost moves at a snails pace, (writer/director David Lowery isn't built for speed). A little like Anthony Mingella's "Truly Madly Deeply" before it, it's about grief and loss and not letting go. Early in the film the character played by Casey Affleck is killed off, only to return as a ghost, rising from his mortuary slab under a large white sheet with holes for eyes like someone playing at being a ghost on Halloween. He spends the rest of this virtually silent film searching, though I'm not sure he quite knows what he's searching for.

Nothing very much happens and when any of the tropes of the horror movie do raise their head they are quickly dismissed and forgotten. In the films most memorable scene he simply stands and watches his grieving widow, (Rooney Mara), as she sits and eats a very large pie. In a conventional horror film he would fly across the room to terrify her and us but here it's she who races from the room to throw up.

There's little dialogue and no real action yet the film is incredibly moving; ghosts, it seems, are everywhere, waiting for something or someone that may or may not come. Death, like life, holds its disappointments. This is not a movie for everyone but if you're in the mood for a languorous, ruminative meditation on life after death it's certainly the film for you.