A Ghost Story 2017

All ghost stories (I'm talking movies here) are sad. Well maybe not some of the comedies but as a kid I was very sad when "Hold That Ghost" was over, and since it was on million dollar movie I could re-watch it a million times.
I should say that I love ghost movies, they are one of my favorite sub genres and I think I've seen most of the really good and even not so good ones. That said the other night I watched one of the really good ones, “A Ghost Story” directed by David Lowery who is a young director to keep an eye on. He has a way with images and of telling a story.
The film is short,direct and unusual. A young couple played by Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara who starred in Lowery's “Aint' Them Bodies Saints" a great title by the way in 2013 are cast once again as lovers who happen to be married and live in a non de-script small ranch house somewhere out in Texas way.
We don’t know much about them, they don’t even have names, he fiddles with music and she has some kind of a job that is never shown. There are some conflicts, she wants to move, he doesn’t and then he is killed in a car accident. All we see of this is the aftermath and then Mara in the morgue where she looks for awhile and leaves, and the ghost of her dead man rises up in a white sheet with cut out out holes for eyes , a poor child’s idea of a Halloween costume and at first I had to laugh.
But soon the poignancy of this spook takes over and I was moved and sadden. The ghost (yes it’s Affleck under the sheet) stands around invisible of course to everyone but us and life goes on. Mara moves out and a sweet single parent Latino family moves in and this is really the most upsetting sequence because the ghost scares the crap out of the little kids and the mother who cleans up the broken dishes the ghost has thrown at them and moves out. Who could blame them.
The ghost moves back and forth in time to the past when the landscape the house sits on was prairie and a family is massacred by Indians to the future where a huge futuristic city rises where their house once stood and has some short conversations of another ghost who "lives" across the way through opposite windows. There is a lovely score to go along with the beautiful images and the aspect ratio is odd projected at 1:33:1 with rounded corners. One critic said it was like a snapshot which it does but I thought of silent movies, and at first it bothered me until I settled in with it. This is an odd and lovely film. One of the best films of 2017