Purgatory is a concept many artists and writers have tried to capture in their work since the beginning of time itself. Not one of them has come close to David Lowery’s A Ghost Story. On the surface, this film looks goofy, with the ghost looking like a simple white sheet with holes for eyes, just like all of our Halloween costumes when we were kids. However, upon watching the film, it annihilates that first impression and throws viewers into a beautifully nihilistic story of love, loss, grief, and memory. How does he do it? By employing silence.
Silence is incredibly uncomfortable, there’s no secret there. It is in our nature to want to fill that silence with some sort of a sound, hence the creation of the words “um” or “uh.” So, when you think of an almost entirely silent movie, and no, not like those weird Charlie Chaplain films, it sounds like a nightmare. It’s so rare for directors to use extended periods of silence in their films, let alone over five minutes dedicated to Rooney Mara’s character eating a pie. However, Lowery chooses to let the style of his film tell the story, rather than the dialogue itself.
The movie is shot in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio and at 33 frames per second for scenes with Casey Affleck’s ghost and 24 frames per second for when Mara was on screen. When asked why he made the choice to shoot in that aspect ratio, Lowery explained, “[A Ghost Story] is about someone basically trapped in a box for eternity, and I felt the claustrophobia of that situation could be amplified by the boxiness of the aspect ratio.” The ghost is tethered to the house in which he once lived with his wife (Mara). He wanders around it in silence, unable to be seen or heard by his wife, only able to observe her mourning.
Why is he still on Earth though? As his wife begins to move on from her loss and rejoin the world of the living, she moves out and leaves the ghost at the house to search for his ticket to the afterlife. He is trapped on the planet on which he has been taken from far too early. Pairing the inability of our spectral spectator to comfort his grieving wife with the boxy outline of the film itself creates a harrowing sense of dread and confinement. Then looking further at the frames per second, when asked why he chose this approach to filming his characters, Lowery states, “one of the things we turned to was shooting him at a different frame rate, because it added a slightly surreal edge to his movements.” The ghost in this film is not your typical CGI created wisp of a lost soul, it is genuinely a physical blank sheet. So, the challenge of filming a ghost this way was getting him to actually feel like a ghost. However, he shot Rooney Mara in 24 frames per second, so blending them together created a unique dynamic that shows the dead and the living existing on two separate planes of time. All of these stylistic choices are incredibly important to the film, but they don’t tell the story by themselves, they simply support it.
The silence is what makes the story excel in all that it strives to do. There are two main characters, a husband and wife, and when the husband is killed in a car crash there really isn’t anyone else for the wife to talk to. They may be together in the same room, but they are both entirely alone. In absolute silence, the ghost retraces the steps of his love by looking at photographs on the fridge or staring longingly at their shared belongings. The helplessness that the ghost feels as he watches his beloved wife suffer pours salt on the open wound that is created from the heartbreaking laps around their home.
After a while, there is finally a sound. Music! The wife lays on the ground and listens to the very last song her husband made before he died and recounts the first time he played it for her. Lowery plays on that saying that we have to have the bad days to appreciate the good ones by bringing out this song. After a long period of silence, viewers are finally able to breathe when this song plays, and in doing so we can learn to appreciate this particular moment so much more. Daniel Hart’s band Dark Rooms created the song, I Get Overwhelmed plays at the height of the viewer’s listening abilities.
After a long silence, it is no surprise that viewers would hold onto every word of that song, since it is the first thing they have heard for a while. The lyrics of this song fit perfectly with the thematic decisions of the film, including lines like “Did she die in the night? / And leave you alone? / Alone” or “Did she find someone else? / And leave me alone? / Alone.” These lines directly reference key events in the plot and even foreshadow the inevitable moving on of the ghost’s wife. Once the song ends, viewers are again plunged into a heartbreaking silence.
This silence is present while the wife is dropped off to the home by another man, moves out, and leaves the ghost alone to suffer with what he has just witnessed. He is unable to shout or scream or even cry, he just stands in silence and takes it all in. Soon, a family moves in and they make some noise for the audience to breathe once more and eventually there is the final piece of extended dialogue in the film. About ⅔ of the way through the 92-minute runtime, there is a party in the ghost’s home, wherein a drunken man delivers a monologue for the ages.
Every single word is delicately crafted to stick with viewers long after the credits roll. I still think of it long after having seen this film. This man dives headfirst into the pointlessness of our entire existence, he explains how sure, we can write a book or play a song and that thing might live on for longer than we do, but inevitably, everything about our reality will cease to exist. He destroys the common desire to create something to be remembered by explaining that even if that something is remembered through the heat death of our planet, there is still the eventual end of the universe itself that surely won’t allow it to live on. This nihilistic take on our existence silences the room and brings all attention to this man as he conveys just how small and insignificant we all are. As he finishes, the lights begin to flicker, and it seems as though the lightbulb is about to pop. When it does, audiences are thrown back into silence to reflect on what they just heard.
This silence lasts for the rest of the film, as we watch the ghost exist through different periods of time. He is forced to leave his home when it is destroyed to build a massive office building on top of it, but he is still tethered to the land itself. So, when the building is completed, he’s still trapped inside. But why is the ghost still on Earth? Other spirits have come and gone and been set free, but he is still trapped.
He attempts to end his eternal suffering by jumping off the roof of this futuristic building. Instead of dying, he falls back in time to when the very first settlers came to where his house would eventually be built. In a silent montage, he watches time go by, seeing families live and die, until he is back at the night before he was killed. He watches over his wife and past self and relives the moments of grief his wife faces alone, once more. Finally, when the wife is about to move out again, the ghost finds the key to his freedom. The screen goes white and the movie ends.
Lowery’s choice of silence in the last 30+ minutes of the film beautifully encapsulates the ideas that are present within that monologue, without saying a single word. The ghost sees the future, the past, and everything in between, silently, making it feel empty and scattered as if it never really mattered in the first place. When he returns to his time, there is only one thing on his mind. Not being remembered, not what he leaves behind, but just his freedom from the cycle of death and grief that the world seems to be trapped in. He finds that freedom and the audience does find some kind of hope and optimism for the future as the credits roll.
A Ghost Story is an absolutely incredible film that I strongly recommend everyone to watch at least once before they die. All of the dialogue is contained in an 11-page script and the score is used extremely sparingly all to tell a story that needs to be shown rather than told. It all comes together in the end to create a masterpiece that is sure to haunt all of its audience members until the day they die.
Featured image credited to Intricate Explorer via Unsplash.
