A few weeks ago A Ghost Story was included in a list of ‘post-horror’ films in a Guardian piece by Steve Rose. Now it’s been released in the UK to some glowing reviews and some extravagant claims. I fear, however, that for many audiences it might provoke an ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ response. Rose foresees this when he notes that another possible example of the trend, It Comes at Night (like A Ghost Story, given a 4 star review by the Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw) has been denounced on social media. Rose suggests:
Mainstream moviegoers went in expecting a straight-up horror; they came out unsure about what they’d seen, and they didn’t like it.
The point being that a ‘post-horror film’ is not really a horror film at all. The director of A Ghost Story, David Lowery, is quoted by Rose as saying:
I wanted to engage with the archetypes and iconography of ghost films and haunted house movies, without ever crossing over into actually being a horror film.
Well, that seems clear enough. But what if you haven’t read the quote and all you see is a film poster for A Ghost Story with a load of 4 and 5 star review notices? You’d reasonably expect something that resembles a horror movie or at least an entertaining fantasy. My real concern is the implication of Rose’s statement above. If you are a mainstream movie fan, you won’t ‘get’ the post-horror film. This suggests a new form of cinema snobbery.
If you want to see the film, I suggest avoiding Peter Bradshaw’s review since he tells you most of the plot. I’ll just mention a few of the elements in the film. The single point that is emphasised in the poster, the trailer and all the promo pics is that Lowery’s ghost is represented by the white sheet of the traditional genre image with two eye holes that are disturbingly deep and dark. This seemingly substantial ghost moves slowly through every scene after the death of the Casey Affleck character early in the narrative – but it can’t be seen by others, only ‘felt’ by some. Affleck and Rooney Mara are a couple (the characters are not named) on the verge of moving out of a suburban house when an accident kills Affleck. The rest of the 90 minutes follows the ghost.
What follows is sometimes funny, sometimes silly, sometimes potentially moving, sometimes irritating but often, I’m afraid, a bit boring. Lowery wants us to know that ghosts aren’t stuck in one time period, they exist ‘outside time’, so although the ghost doesn’t move that much, we can see it in different time periods. This is hardly a revolutionary idea but it does have possibilities for some kind of meditation on time. At one point, I did wonder if what I was watching was similar to the structural avant-garde films of the 1970s by artists like Hollis Frampton with Zorn’s Lemma in which images are repeated with slight variations and the viewer must spot the patterns or Michael Snow with Wavelength comprising a single ‘zoom in’ which nevertheless builds narrative tension. But I decided A Ghost Story wasn’t as interesting.
A Ghost Story does have its moments and the ‘mini lecture’ by Will Oldham in a party scene will be the test for most audiences. Oldham is an actor and musician, perhaps best known for his work in two Kelly Reichardt films. Like Reichardt in Meek’s Cutoff (2011), Lowery opts for an Academy ratio screen shape, but I’m not sure why. Reichardt’s films move slowly, but she shares a novelist’s ability to tell stories through nuances and tiny details. I didn’t get that from A Ghost Story. Here’s the US trailer. It indicates the interesting images and hints at some of the plot points, but it can’t really represent the slow pace of the narrative. If you want a horror film, I’d watch Get Out again. If it’s a romance you want, I’d try Maudie.
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