Still waiting for something to happen. So this is about a couple in a house. When the man (Casey Affleck) dies unexpectedly, he haunts the house with a bed sheet over his head like he is Charlie Brown going trick-or-treating. Maybe he will find peace in the afterlife, or maybe he will just hang out… Now Casey Affleck has a bad rep right now for the allegations in his personal life, and while I do think he should be properly reprimanded, I have almost always been able to separate the art from the artist to give every movie a fair shot (Roman Polanski still makes good movies, regardless of his despicable history). So that said, what did I think about A Ghost Story, a movie that has been a big hit with the critics? I think it is art-house trash that has delusions of grandeur.
Even dead people want to be Batman.
A Ghost Story is a movie that takes a really long time to get nowhere. There are long, extended, uncut scenes of just nothing happening, even more than Paranormal Activity; I was waiting for some sort of scare in the background because there was so little going on, and even worse, it never came. In fact, there is so little happening in some scenes, I thought there was something wrong with the DVD I was watching this on because it was like I was staring at a static painting, and this is coming from somebody who likes Michael Haneke movies. There’s a scene of Rooney Mara eating a pie for five straight minutes with no dialogue (it feels more like fifteen minutes). Why is this featured? I couldn’t tell you. Where some other director would yell “cut!”, David Lowery keeps going… and going. This is only 90 minutes long, but because there is just so little story or action in general, it ends up feeling at least double that. I’m going to have a general rule of thumb going forward that if you can describe your film as being a contemplation, a reflection, or a meditation, I am not going to be excited to watch your movie.
My deepest apologies to all of the Terrence Malick fans out there.
I suppose you could transpose a lost love here, but that is something that the movie never earns. The cinematography is decent (in a funky aspect ratio, not 16:9 for some reason), but it is never to the point of saving it. It feels like it is wasting your time at every painstaking minute, and I think somebody deserves to be punished for making this so deliberately and excruciatingly paced. It is so slow, that I almost wanted to watch this in double time, and speaking candidly, I don’t think I would have missed a damn thing. A Ghost Story is a watch checker if there ever was one, and it is my unexpected worst movie of the year, at least so far.
A Ghost Story (2017) 1/2
– Critic for Hire
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