Later, during another tenancy, a prolix partygoer drones on about eternity, asking what, if anything, will survive it.
New residents-a single mother with two kids-show up, and their contentment enrages C plates are tugged from shelves and flung across the room. Eventually, she packs up and moves away, but even then C remains on the spot, as if the time they once enjoyed there were more precious than M herself. On rare occasions, he wields the powers of a poltergeist-causing the lights to flicker in fury, say, when she brings a guy home. Whatever M does, C is right there, gazing upon her, unsuspected, and largely unstirred.
We talk of being haunted by a fatal mistake, but Lowery’s film is prompted by geographical woe: ghosts linger in one place because it contains somebody they love and can no longer have. On the contrary, he is heading home from the morgue, toward the single-story house that he shared with M. The loveliest and the loneliest sight in the film is a wide shot of a grassy field, with a pale sun above and, in the bottom right, the small white spectre, plodding along, the hem of his sheet dragging behind like the train of a wedding dress. What’s surprising, given that we never see the face of the deceased, and that his hands are covered, is how expressive Affleck manages to be, supplying a jolt to his statuesque calm and his yearning motions alike. He even has eyeholes, though presumably no eyes to peer through them. He also stood very still, clad in a white sheet, and that is what C wears, for the rest of this movie, resembling every basic ghost ever drawn in crayon by a child.
“A Ghost Story” is seldom a scary movie, but it comes from scary stock the last figure to sit up like that, with such sudden purpose, was the white-masked bogeyman who lay on the floor behind Jamie Lee Curtis, in “Halloween” (1978). For every viewer who snickers at this, I reckon, there will be another who accepts it without a shiver, and a third who will be faintly freaked out. (The crash itself, like other major incidents, occurs offscreen in this film, aftermath is everything.) At the morgue, M views the body, which is draped in a white sheet she exits, there is a lengthy pause, and then the sheet sits up. Having left the house, he is seen slumped against the steering wheel of a crashed car. She is M (Rooney Mara), he is C (Casey Affleck), and that’s that.
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They murmur, canoodle, and doze as the hours grow small, only to be awakened by a sound-hard to place, but akin to the deep twang of a spring, or to the melancholy breaking of a string that Chekhov specifies in “The Cherry Orchard.” Only much later in the movie do we discover the source of the noise, and only in the final credits will the lovers be identified.
Only a clue, mind you the questions that Lowery raises hang in the air, like motes of dust, long after the movie is done. Now, thanks to “A Ghost Story,” a new film by David Lowery, we have some sort of clue. (Substitute “living” for “quick,” and the effect is halved.) Moreover, the creed that he sketches out seems far from implausible, though I have often wondered what form the attending might take. I happen to find this the most beautiful passage in all Nabokov.