An All Too Human Ghost Story

David Lowery's sincere 'A Ghost Story' starts by testing your patience and proceeds to test your ability to keep in the tears.

My unhealthy obsession with Mark Kozelek's music this year has come in handy, with his lyricism of human connection echoing the poetic nature of this David Lowery piece. Speaking of poetry, the form of the film upon reflection seems like a villanelle. The film itself does not reveal anything new to us as human beings - we are all aware of our limited existence, we are all aware of how invested we are in our memories, we are all aware of the possibility that we will have to grieve the death of a loved one in our life time. Like a villanelle, we are constantly refreshed of these ideas but what the film allows you to do, in bizarre fashion, is see all this from the perspective of one who has already passed.

The film most certainly tests your patience at times and while I personally did not enjoy such dragged out sections, I can also adopt the persona of one who can simply shrug their shoulders and say "hey, that's life." Through making us aware of real time, Lowery is, arguably, merely commenting on those empty silences in life. Time does not seem like a straight line in the film and the same can be said in life. We put so much import on moments that amount to nothing but seconds and minutes like the first gaze at someone you know you can love or the time where you listen to that one song you realise you can listen to forever. We chop time up through the magnitude of our memories and this was captured in A Ghost Story. The film flickers through time the way we flicker through memories and from looking at this couple who have been in a relationship for an unknown amount of time, the film gradually widens its scope (as well as its lens in the most beautiful manner) to a degree where we question the relationship between man and nature, man and time and ultimately man and man.

It should be of no surprise to you then that when my housemate and I ascended the stairs to leave the cinema, we were passing by these faces of melancholy and awe because the film genuinely leaves you in a state that we seldom come across. With the director himself stating“I was having an existential crisis. I felt everything was meaningless”, the film itself I do not think leaves you with the burden of an existential crisis but more so an existential understanding of the important things in life that we ought to treasure or dwell on until our very own life cuts to credits.

I also have the honour of using our new ranking system on this blog for the first time!

I give A Ghost Story a 9/13.

~Iman Bahmanabadi