The Sundance film in which Casey Affleck acts from under a bed sheet and Rooney Mara sombrely eats pie for four minutes
It's more of an art experiment than a horror film
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Every year, Sundance rolls around and a couple of intriguing oddities present themselves. In 2016 it was Swiss Army Man, the ‘farting corpse’ movie that sounded ridiculous but ended up being quite a thoughtful piece of cinema. This time around, A Ghost Story is one to keep an eye on, a little passion project from David Lowery, the man behind Disney’s Pete’s Dragon.
Shot in Texas for next to nothing, it stars Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara as characters identified only as C and M in the credits, with (spoilers ahead) C dying very early on in a road accident and haunting M for the rest of the movie.
Variety notes that is in no way a “straightforward horror movie” and, if anything, is more of a “conceptual experiment” that would be "better suited to a museum setting”.
Affleck doesn’t play a spooky, Paranormal Activity-esque ghost but rather a classic bed sheet-based one, staying underneath the sheet for most of the film, which unfolds slowing, at one point allowing four minutes for Mara to eat a pie in silence.
When the twist reveals itself, the audience discovers the ghost is not in the couple’s past but their future.
A Ghost Story is perhaps an outsider when it comes to awards, but it has all the hallmarks of a buzzy indie film that will hover at the edges of 2017 film conversations.
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