A Ghost Story Review (2017)

I’m ready to declare 2017 the year of the art house ghost movie. Both Oliver Assayas’ “Personal Shopper” and now David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story” are mundane, quietly eerie supernatural dramas about grappling with grief and finding closure. “Personal Shopper,” which came out in March, starred Kristen Stewart as an amateur medium desperately trying to make contact with the spirit of her recently deceased twin brother. Meanwhile, “A Ghost Story” takes the point of view of a grieving ghost stuck in a purgatorial state.

That ghost is/was C, (Casey Affleck) a musician who died in a sudden car accident. After his widow M (Rooney Mara) goes to identify his body at the morgue, the ghost…wakes up. He stands up and proceeds to walk out of the room with a white sheet still covering him. Out in the hallway, a portal containing a blinding white light materializes in front of him, presumably a door to the afterlife. However C chooses not to go and instead walks across roads and fields, back to his suburban house to see his grieving wife. What does he do? Does he try to make contact with her? Does he help her make pottery? No, he just watches her, still dawning that white bed sheet, now with a pair of eyeholes, reminiscent of a child’s Halloween costume. This low-tech costume choice is oddly effective--creepy, mysterious and refreshing.

Of the two films, “A Ghost Story” is more experimental and abstract. Aside from containing very little plot and action, it’s primarily composed of lengthy single take shots that sometimes go on for five to seven minutes. This deliberate visual style mimics C’s onscreen behavior and desires. He wants to spend as much time as he can with M before he passes on. He wants to cherish every moment, every movement and every grief inspired breakdown. There’s a palpable, aching feeling of longing and sorrow pulsing through these lengthy scenes.

Admittedly, these scenes can be frustrating at times. There’s a much talked about scene involving M grief eating an entire pie while C watches from beyond that’s kind of painful to sit through. It’s moving and Mara’s performance is subtly devastating but it’s also a…really really long scene of a woman eating an entire pie. A really long scene. I admit I zoned out during the picture a few times. “A Ghost Story” may be the longest hour and twenty-seven minute movie I’ve ever seen.

“A Ghost Story” can be difficult to endure but after the first thirty minutes or so, the movie really picks up steam. Time itself accelerates, while space rapidly changes shape. Days, years, decades, centuries pass before our eyes in a matter of seconds. Before you even have a chance to blink, a small suburban house materializes into a mighty skyscraper. It’s exhilarating and beautiful. “A Ghost Story” goes from being a claustrophobic film about a wandering soul (yanked out of his body too soon) trying to find closure with his beloved, to a more expansive, ambitious affair. It morphs into a lyrical mediation on the fluidity of time, the nature of legacy, the significance a certain place (a cherished family home, a plot of land) can hold for someone, the vastness of the universe and our minuscule place in it. Lowery manages to pack quite a bit into such a brief run time.

The film becomes one long, surreal, mind-bending montage. Time keeps pushing forward until suddenly it stops and starts over from the beginning, taking our white sheet-wearing friend with it like a current pushing a stick down a river. If you were bored and frustrated with the film before, you won’t be able to take your eyes off it now. “A Ghost Story” can be rough going, especially at the beginning but once it changes into this bigger, more thought provoking film, it’s endlessly absorbing.

B

Personal Shopper Review (2017)

“Personal Shopper,” the hypnotic and quietly unsettling new film from French director Olivier Assayas, asks us to consider the concept of ghosts in more of a subjective sense rather than an objective one. Ghosts aren’t empirical beings that wander around the land of the living on their own but entities born from our own emotional state of mind. That’s why some people claim to experience ghostly presences while others don’t. They’re projections of our fears and anxieties, our guilt and sorrows, our regrets and even our curiosity. Ghosts can be a source of terror and torment but they can also be a source of self-help. Someone who goes to a Medium or Psychic to make contact with a deceased loved one does so for his or her own well-being, for a sense of emotional closure. Perhaps that person feels guilty for their loved ones death or they just haven’t accepted that they’re gone.

Maureen (Kristen Stewart), the protagonist of “Personal Shopper” hasn’t gotten over the death of her twin brother Lewis. So she waits patiently, hoping to make contact with him. She currently lives in Paris (where he lived) and works as a personal shopper for a fashion model to pay the bills, a job she hates but does well. Maureen’s been there for a little over three months and little progress has been made. She’s beginning to grow restless and agitated, struggling to keep her mental composure. It’s at this point that she starts conversing with a mysterious ghost via text message as she travels around Europe on various shopping excursions.

The ghost is a peculiar one to say the least. Sometimes it teases and toys with Maureen, other times it acts like a psychiatrist, asking her tough questions and forcing her to confront repressed feelings. And sometimes it can be erratic and intimidating, snapping at her like an unstable stalker. The ghost is a manifestation of her distraught, unbalanced state of mind that finds her at the right time. In her interactions with this entity, Maureen is able work through her problems; she comes face to face with her deep seeded anxieties and insecurities, not just in regards to her dead brother but in regards to her own sense of self purpose and uncertain future. Right now she’s on a clear mission, (to make contact with her brother) a mission that guides her and gives her purpose. Though once she makes contact, what then? What’s will she do next? What will her purpose be? And when she does make contact with Lewis will that really bring her closure? These questions (and others) haunt Maureen at all times.

The tense, sometimes humorous, sometimes tender text message conversations are among the best scenes in the entire film. Watching Maureen’s progression (from initially resisting the ghost’s digital beckons, to slowly giving into its games and interrogations and ultimately opening herself up emotionally) is endlessly absorbing. “Personal Shopper” is a poignant and thoughtful portrait of personal grief and acceptance with the exhilarating slow burn pacing and structuring of a psychological thriller. Assayas lets the plot unfold with a subtle, unassuming tension and doesn’t spoon-feed the audience. Details concerning character and background are revealed organically, often times through casual conversation and some things are even left unstated.

Though “Personal Shopper” wouldn’t work nearly as well without Stewart’s understatedly magnetic performance. Her natural, low-key onscreen presence is both comforting and hypnotic—she’s in nearly every frame of “Personal Shopper” and you can’t take your eyes off her. As the resilient but damaged Maureen, Stewart exudes an unshakable confidence and put-together-ness that allows her to function in her life as a personal shopper and also masks an internal emotional fragility threatening to overtake her. The brief moments where she allows herself to breakdown and succumb to her overwhelming grief are heart wrenching. In her interactions with the other characters she can be calmly snarky and quietly compassionate. Through her nuanced work here, Stewart continues to prove she’s one of the best working actors.

“Personal Shopper” stumbles a bit when it deals with a murder mystery subplot.  It’s fun to watch in the moment  (Assayas treats it with the same tautness as the rest of the picture) but it ultimately fizzles out, making you wonder why it was there in the first place. Then again, I could be wrong about that, in fact I could be wrong about my overall summation of the film--in regards to how it views ghosts/spirituality. Assayas wisely doesn’t make any definitive statements when it comes to the events and ideas in the picture, meaning you can interpret it any number of ways. “Personal Shopper” is a deceptively complex, intense and emotionally rewarding experience.

A-