Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.0

A Ghost Story Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 30, 2017

Note: Guess what? A Ghost Story has a ghost in it! If you don't want even a hint of whose ghost it is, I'd suggest skipping the main body of the review and dropping down to the technical portions, below.

With Halloween more or less right around the corner, there’s the opportunity to completely confound some kids who may have taken the lo-fi route with regard to costumes and just thrown a sheet with eye holes over themselves. “Oh, look, you’re Casey Affleck!” you might be tempted to say, at least if you’re a curmudgeonly type who likes to make perhaps obscure cinematic references. A Ghost Story has a rather interesting story to tell, one that deals with love, loss, time and memory, but it also exploits a curious and perhaps fatal (no pun intended, given the film’s context) conceit with regard to the spectral entity portrayed by Affleck for the bulk of the film. In one of the supplements included on this Blu-ray, writer and director David Lowery mentions how he had long wanted to make a film about a ghost using only a sheet over the designated actor to indicate that the perform was indeed depicting a spirit. Even Lowery states he found the idea funny, and my hunch is many viewers will as well, and it’s that perhaps inherently comic aspect that seems tonally at odds with a film that is otherwise virtually drenched in melancholy. Certain unexplained aspects also figure into a story that tends to resonate emotionally but which (perhaps like ghosts themselves) defies logic at times. A Ghost Story has received a lot of critical acclaim, but (from my experience, anyway) it’s split audiences more decisively, with some folks I know who have seen it calling it an inarguable masterpiece and other folks I know who have seen it calling it one of the most supreme bores they’ve watched recently. Again, my hunch on how some viewers will respond to A Ghost Story may hinge in great part on how they react to the sight of a grown man traipsing around in a bedsheet for an hour and half.

It’s perhaps indicative of a certain distance from the focal characters that they’re only “named” C (Casey Affleck) and M (Rooney Mara). In just one of what I found to be somewhat baffling plot points, M is talking about having had to move from home to home, evidently because of repeated hauntings, though how this particular “confession” fits into the film’s overall timeline is a little squishy. The fact that this particular allusion is left largely unexplored, as the film veers off into a haunting of the house C and M currently share, perhaps reveals a certain looseness in narrative structure that Lowery continues to employ in a film that can probably only loosely itself be considered horror. This narrative technique is deliberately disjunctive, twisting time back on itself once one of the two main characters ends up dead and becomes the titular spirit. This particular "transformation" is a prime example of how Lowery approaches telling the story, in a sequence some may find fascinating, and other may find either unintentionally or maybe intentionally hilarious. The corpse is covered with a sheet in a hospital morgue and then the camera just stays on it for a good, long while until the body rises up underneath it.

That looseness requires a certain tolerance on the part of the audience to get to what is the film’s best aspect, its rumination on the passage of time and the persistence of memory. Some of the conceits employed, as in a sudden shift to the wild west, are iffy at best and lunatic at worst, but every conceit in this intellectually interesting film pales in comparison to its central one, and for that I refer you to some of the screenshots accompanying this review. How do you feel about a “character” who’s a bedsheet with two Kean sized black eyes, especially when said character is wandering through vast outdoor vistas? I have to confess I just found it all giggle worthy, and therefore couldn’t make it through some of the supposedly emotionally wrenching bits without kind of laughing under my breath. Those with a different kind of tolerance than I evidently have, with regard to this particular presentational aspect, might therefore resonate more strongly with what are actually some rather fascinating ideas that Lowery seems to want to explore. In other words, I feel like perhaps more than many other films, A Ghost Story is going to be one of those "your mileage may vary" options based almost entirely on how you feel about a guy in a sheet.

Some of you may have seen the superb Ingmar Bergman parody The Dove (De Düva) which has laugh out loud vignettes based on some of the master director’s best known films. There was a curiously similar feeling wafting through A Ghost Story for me, and it made me wonder if the film would have played better as a pitch black comedy. In fact, there are some whose jaded sensibilities may appreciate the film as a comedy, especially given the incredibly earnest performances of Affleck (in the non-sheet bits, anyway) and Mara. The comedic highlight of the film for some may be when this particular ghost discovers another spirit living (?) next door, who has a patterned sheet, just so you can tell the difference.

Note: My colleague Brian Orndorf perhaps liked A Ghost Story a bit more than I did. With a warning that Brian reveals whose ghost it is as well, you can read his thoughts here.

A Ghost Story Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

A Ghost Story is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films and A24 with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.33:1 (and note the old school rounded edges of the frame as well). The deliberately retro Academy ratio enforces the confined nature of the film, and it also helps support detail levels in close-ups, in a film which can otherwise be a bit on the drab side, with undercooked contrast and a kind of monochromatic looking palette. There's some appropriately cool grading going on, even in scenes that might seem to be not suited for it, as in some sunny outdoor material. Occasional special effects aren't especially great looking, but don't seriously distract. A lot of the film is intentionally gauzy, as if the focal ghost is drifting through a half remembered dream, and as such fine detail levels can be a bit on the anemic side. That said, even close-ups of what I'm sure will be an iconic bedsheet offer really good fine detail levels on the weave of the fabric. Even the threads at the edges of the black eyes are often individually discernable.

A Ghost Story Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

A Ghost Story has a subtly immersive DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, one that gets occasional jolts from things that go bump in the night to more soothing sounds of Daniel Hart's appropriately elegiac score. The film's long (some might feel interminable) sequences involving the ghost watching untold months and years drift by have an intentional spareness in sound design, and as such surround activity can be on the sporadic side. The film also doesn't have a lot in a traditional dialogue sense, leaving quite a bit of the soundtrack to score and ambient environmental effects.

A Ghost Story Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary with Director David Lowery, Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo, Production Designer Jade Healy, and Composer Daniel Hart


• A Ghost Story and the Inevitable Passing of Time (1080p; 30:20) is a little "arty" for my tastes, set up as a roundtable slash campfire ghost story swap, but there are some interesting comments by the cast and crew.


• A Composer's Story (1080p; 4:37) focuses on Daniel Hart.


• Deleted Scene (1080p; 5:56) comes with a disclaimer that it hasn't been color corrected or had its sound mixed.

A Ghost Story Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Here's the thing with A Ghost Story for me: Lowery already provides a really cool visual referent for a spirit in the film's very opening scene, when C glimpses the spectral rainbow climbing up the wall. For me, anyway, the film would have been so much more effective if he had continued to use that glyph as the symbol for the ghost, which could have artfully been woven with point of view shots to clearly depict what was going on. Having someone stumbling around in a sheet is almost unavoidably funny, at least to jaded folks like me, and it instantly distanced me from the film's underlying melancholy. Those more tolerant of the film's central visual conceit may well find this a thought provoking exercise that doesn't have the comedic baggage it might for others, though even those folks may have occasional questions about Lowery's more "arty" proclivities. Technical merits are generally strong, and with caveats duly noted, A Ghost Story comes Recommended.