Watch A Ghost Story online at anyone of of these online streaming confectionaries:
I’m going to start with, “A Ghost Story Isn’t For Everyone.” But I’m betting it’ll almost definitely work for you. Most people that hang out here at THiNC. are into movies that are a little more difficult to understand and take some unpacking in order to make heads or tails out of them. And A Ghost Story is DEFINITELY one of those movies. Anyway, it has my endorsement that it will be worth your time if those are the sorts of movies you are into. But yeah, it can be incredibly slow, and extraordinarily thoughtful in its cadence.
So, for those of you who haven’t seen it, A Ghost Story tells the story of two people. One of them dies (this isn’t a spoiler, this is the POINT) and the rest of the movie is the interactions between the survivor and the ghost that remains. It is a measured movie that rewards the thoughtful among us. This isn’t a Bruce Willis Die Hard. That is for sure. But if you have a movie diet that requires pensiveness, this will fill your quota for a month. But it’s worth while pensiveness. (Is there another kind?) Entre-trailer:
And really all I want to know about this movie? How’d they make the eyes black like that? Heheh. So yeah, go see it if you haven’t already. And now to the spoilers. Ok? Everyone leave that hasn’t seen this movie already. Come back. Join in. Simple enough.
HERE BE DRAGONS – SPOILERS AHEAD
Ghost Story Overview
This really is the simplest of all stories… until, it isn’t. But even that left hook is manageable. But here it is in a nutshell, Casey Affleck – or M in the credits, and Rooney Mara – or C in the credits, have this quiet and intriguing relationship together. They seem betwixt and between. C wants to move, and M definitely does not. C tries to talk about it and M really won’t have any part of it.
And as these conversations are happening we see spectral lights and unaccounted for lens flares. I immediately jumped back to Personal Shopper and the ghosts we saw in that movie and assumed that even before his death we had a ghost already there with them. But we’ll get to that in a moment.
Possibly the most interesting, and most intriguing, piece of dialogue in the movie is C’s discussion of her habit of leaving notes in homes that she was moving away from. And it is so important, I thought I’d just quote it directly here for reference:
C – “When I was little, we would move all the time, I would write these notes, and fold them up really small and I would hide them.”
M – “What’d they say?”
C – “They were things I just wanted to remember so that if I ever wanted to go back there would be a piece of me there waiting.”
We’ll refer back to this a little later as well. But for now, we know that C leaves important notes behind when she moves on. Oh, and they are significant. Really really important.
A Ghost Story – How Did M Die?
As the movie moves forward we are soon presented with a fairly gnarly car crash just outside of the house. And cut to the hospital morgue where we see C standing over M. No tears. But she is obviously shattered. Obviously M died in the car accident… but the only way that I can figure out how it happened is if he backed out of his driveway and was hammered by a speeding car that didn’t see him coming. I mean, don’t get me wrong, this movie is as much about this house as it is about C & M, and dropping to totaled cars just outside the house is brilliant. But in my neighborhood anyway, it’d be difficult to die pulling out of my drive way. Just saying. So yeah, the only way that I can think that he died right outside his driveway, was by getting hit by some oncoming car.
A Ghost Story – Eternity Bypassed
After an interminable shot of C and M in the hospital morgue, M gets up. And it was just such a gloriously beautiful shot from beginning to end. I even went back later and checked to see how C had placed the sheet so that it would fold so perfectly. I was, in a word, intrigued. Anyway, as M is walking down the hallway, a door opens up. An opportunity to punt on this thing called earth. But M doesn’t take it. Which, I might add, makes sense, seeing what we know about M. He’s a home body. A musician. He doesn’t want to give up on the house. He wants to stay close. So yeah, M isn’t going to take the bright glowing door. No. Not our M. Instead he heads back to C and their home.
A Ghost Story – A Sense of Loss
(Can I just say that I literally, just minutes ago made myself, a much too big Mojito… with wayyy too much rum? Right, so this Ghost Story retelling might just get a little bit woo. Whatever that means.) Now that M is up and mobile this picture of the dead is just such a perfect picture. A sheet, a foreboding, standing in the corner as you gorge yourself on an entire pie. Which, I saw this fantastic quote somewhere, with Casey talking about Rooney and this scene that I just have to share:
“There was quite a bit of build up to that. What kind of pie is it going to be? Where is the pie coming from? Who is making the pie? Rooney had strangely never eaten a pie which is the weirdest thing. There are lots of things I haven’t eaten, but you’d think a pie is something you’d have come across at some point.”
Which, while the movie was super slow and introspective, this was my favorite part of the movie… just this perspective of the dead just longing and hankering for reconnecting with their inconsolable loved ones. I don’t want to jump to the end of my review, but I might as well spill the beans at some point. Personally, the really gorgeous aspect of this film was just how perfectly it described the loss of a loved one. The entirety of the movie is 100% lacking other people and other connections. And in death, even though people might be around, it is so difficult to focus on them, or to even share why it is it hurts so much. Right? And you can see this in C and M.
Actually, I see the Ghost as a manifestation of C’s grief more than a literal character in the film. The boulder that is getting dragged around behind her more than anything else. Right? I mean, sure, he’s there. But it seems to me that the movie comes from her perspective. A retelling of the horror that she is going through, if that makes sense at all.
Eventually C brings someone home and M knocks books on the floor to show his outrage. But then we get this fantastic music interlude where M was sharing a song with C. I can relate to this interaction more than I would care to admit. But I’ll just leave it at that.
A Ghost Story – Life, Universe and Everything
This brings us to this fantastic party wherein we get a soliloquy from a bald guy waxing eloquent. Everyone is holding to his every word. “What if there was no God and we find out that all of Beethoven’s work was for nothing? Maybe it was just so that others would remember him? To endure? You write a book, but the pages will burn.” It’s an interesting dilemma. Why are we here? Maybe we are here to cast as far a ripple as possible?
But What About the Note?
We realize very quickly on, that C’s note will be the central device (McGuffin if you will) for the entirety of the movie. What did she write? Why did she leave it there painted into the doorframe? And there is M, after having lived through other occupancies of the house, with the note almost out, only to have it wrecked by a backhoe. Hrm. Disappointing! How are we going to find out what the note says!?!?
Well, on goes the movie into the future, where the house gets rebuilt as an office building and a parking garage. Well, M quickly sickens of this, and takes a header off the office building “killing himself” again. He apparently did that in order to flash backwards in time to the original homesteaders of the area. What?! Where is this movie going? But soon enough we are back to M and C… and now M-the-ghost is watching M-the-man interact with C. Soon enough M is dead again, and now there are two of him ghosting throughout the house. (Which, completely explains the sounds they were hearing before he died. It explains the things falling on the piano. The spectral lights. Which, I had assumed was another ghost in the house ahead of him. Which, I guess is true, to a degree.)
But then M finally gets the note out. And finally! We are going to get a chance to see it! And there was M-the-ghost flipping open the note he had spent hundreds of years trying to discover. And as he opens up the note – poof – blam – gone disappears both manifestations of himself. Here’s a pretty sweet quote from Lowery about this doubling back effect. Even though he wrote the time loop into the first draft, he didn’t initially anticipate the final shot of two ghosts standing there watching her.
“That was a spontaneous day on set that ended up being a very definitive and profound visual, and we could have kept it going!” he recalls. “We had done three takes of that shot, and then I thought, ‘When we shot this earlier for the first version, the ghost was standing at the window, so shouldn’t he be there? And if he could see the ghost next door, couldn’t he also see himself?’ I didn’t want to get too bogged down in rules, but it seemed like a nice visual reference to what’s happening. When we saw it on camera that day, we thought it really brought the movie home in a significant fashion.”
Somebody Explain A Ghost Story’s Ending To Me
So what happened with that ending? The note was obviously the key necessary to free his soul from the wandering, lost, and confused soul that he had become. Remember that other ghost in the house next door? Well, he was confused and totally off kilter, completely unclear as to who they were waiting for. Could it be that the longer M roamed, the longer he waited, the more confused he’d become? But M seemed to maintain the singular mindset of his home, this place, and the note. Right? Even after waiting hundreds(?) of years to arrive back at his home again he began digging the note out right away.
For me, the movie was actually about that feeling of foreboding and dread of loss after losing someone close to you. Quick rabbit trail, I was four or five the first time I lost a very close friend. I remember his “catching” cancer and his losing his hair. I remember playing with him even when he was too sick to really interact, but I spent time with him because I knew no one else would. And the night Tom died, we were both in the same hospital together. I had just had my tonsils removed. And Tom had been admitted with yet another scary altercation with the demon cancer. But this time, Tom lost the battle, and succumbed to his injuries. And as I spent the next week or two eating jello and slurping cottage cheese I remember the true oppression that was my mourning. I remember scribbling drawings about Tom. I remember refusing to speak about it. It was as if he was there in the room with me, standing with a sheet over his head, watching from a distance.
This is what the movie was about for me. The real dance that the living have with the dead. Not the other way round. Though, I will forgive you if you wrongly disagree (heheh).
But who cares about what the movie was ultimately about – what was in the note!?! What if we walk through a couple possibilities…
Theory Number #1 – Sod Off
This one made me laugh when I thought of it. What if she was just angry and pissed about the way things went and she just wrote “Sod off!” on the note. She had a feeling that he was still hanging around and decided to just tell him to bugger off? Yeah, I don’t like it either, but it was worth a chuckle. Lowery even joked in one interview I saw that no one on the set knew what Rooney wrote… and even if she did, she’s not sharing. So what if, he said, what if it actually just said boo? Too funny.
A Ghost Story Note Theory #2 – Sentimentality and Best Wishes
If you were about to die, like literally had 20 seconds to decide what to say, for MOST people you’d snap into the normal ritual of things that you would say normally. “I love you – you mean the world to me…” whatever you normally say. So in this theory I assume that she just dashed off her thoughts of love and best wishes for M.
A Ghost Story Note Theory #3 – A Lyric
My personal favorite theory – and therefore, THE CORRECT theory – is that she wrote a lyric on the page. Better yet, what if she wrote a lyric from that song that M had played for her that he had written. (Which, was actually a song from the band Dark Rooms, a song called I Get Overwhelmed.) And, the opening stanza seems fairly apropos: “Are you runnin late? / Did you sleep too much? / All the awful dreams / Felt real enough / Is your lover there? / Is she wakin up? / Did she die in the night? / And leave you alone? / Alone.” What if she chose a line from this verse of his song? Like maybe, “Is your lover there? Is she wakin up?” Wouldn’t that have been the perfect closed loop for them both?
A Ghost Story Note Theory #4 – It Really Doesn’t Matter
Theory four? Yeah, theory 4 is a cop out – but it’s what the director thinks… so yadda yadda, we’ll mention it here. So yeah, what if it doesn’t really matter? Further on in that interview with the writer and director Lowery, he said, “We thought about whether or not we should show it, but it doesn’t matter as much as just knowing that he got it. Nothing written there would mean anything to the audience at that point, and it would just complicate that moment — you’d see something, process it, and then wonder what it means.”
If you know me at all you know I do not, at all, like this answer. Any. I always want to push to the answer. I want to drive the logical to ground and figure out everything I can. But on this one… I don’t know. If it were real life – stretch I know – but if it were real, I agree with Lowery. It wouldn’t make sense to us at all. It’d be totally nonsensical. Maybe it was a quote from a thing she sang around the house from their song. Or maybe it was just a simple letting go of whatever she was holding on to while eating that pie. I don’t know. But in this theory it is relevant to the two of them, and that’s all that really matters.
Final Thoughts On A Ghost Story
I know that many in American will absolutely trash this movie on Rotten Tomatoes and elsewhere. GAH! This movie as so slow! Awful movie. Terrible Plot! NOTHING HAPPENED. Sha. I found it a really an amazing film. Deeply profound. Made me think about what it would be like to lose my wife. What it would be like to really try and work through that pain. Truly. I really did find it fascinating at every level. Loved the loop back and the re-dive back into history.
And as for the note? The linchpin for the entire movie? I personally think that she would have scribbled a line from a lyric that M had written. Honoring him. Remembering him. And an homage to his creativity and his passions for place and this particular location. It actually logically follows. I may even tweet out to Rooney and Lowery to see what they think. But ultimately, I do agree with Lowery, it doesn’t really matter. We do know though, that the thing that was written on that page released him. Set him free. Right? I don’t know… what do you think was written on that page?
Little trivia? Rooney actually did write something on a page. And she actually did put it in the wall. And that not was actually lost when they demolished the house at the end of the film. Truly. Rooney is the only one who knows what’s on that page… HRMMM. Fascinating! hahah.
Edited by, CY