Timeline of a ghost

Making A Ghost Story was a daring act by writer/ director David Lowery, and he has delivered a film that proves his worth as a true auteur. Anyone with the vision to imagine this story as a movie, let alone the creativity and courage to bring it to the screen, is an artist to keep an eye on. His biggest movie to date is Pete’s Dragon (2016), with Robert Redford. They work together again on Old Man and the Gun (2018?), which also stars Casey Affleck, who was also in Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints with Rooney Mara, who is also in this movie, A Ghost Story. Lowery may be developing a roster of players in a way that so many film directors do, from John Ford and Ingmar Bergman and Mike Leigh and Spike Lee.

The deceased, in costume.

The plot is simple but ambitious: A modest bungalow is occupied by an unmarried couple, M (Rooney Mara, the sister with talent) and C (Casey Affleck, the luckiest actor alive, as he admitted in his Oscar speech when he thanked Kenneth Lonergan who “made this part and without this part and without his writing, I wouldn’t be here”). We don’t learn much about M and C, other than that he is a musician and composer, and is soon dead. Early on in the film, he is killed in a car accident, she returns home— and so does he, invisibly, as a ghost who rises up from a slab in the morgue wearing the sheet he was covered with (a powerful image and idea). Time passes, but he stays even after she moves away, haunting the property far into the future as well as the past, as far back as when the first white settlers arrive, and then forward again to the present, when he watches himself and M move in.

This is not a conventional movie in any way. The bold strokes include: