A GHOST STORY

CONTAINS EEEEK! SPOILERS

Don't worry: this isn't a scary film at all. I mean, it's obviously a horror film, and it's a film with a ghost in it - that much is on the poster and in the title - but it's a safe bet that you absolutely won't find what's on screen scary. Funny, quirky, sad, perhaps. Behind the screen, the ideas behind the story, that's the troubling territory. A Ghost Story is a ghost story for ghosts: a ghost story from the ghost's perspective. And if this is how we come back, it's utterly terrifying.

C and M (Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara) are a young, moderately happy couple whose average, everyday domestic relationship is shattered when he's killed in a car smash (this isn't a spoiler, as it takes place in the first ten minutes of the film). Rising off the morgue trolley, he has the chance to go towards the light but instead returns as an invisible, inaudible presence in the house. Invisible to everyone else, but visible to us as the simplest and most old-fashioned ghost: hidden under a sheet with eyeholes cut out. Silently watching M go through her grief, standing unobserved next to her... until she meets someone else and eventually moves out of the house, crucially leaving a handwritten note tucked into the woodwork as she leaves. The contents of this note become the driving force in his (after)life and he ends up worrying away at the tiny crack in the paint to find this sliver of paper...

Meanwhile, real life goes on as a family move in to the house - and he's still there. Years go by and the house changes hands again - and he's still there. Alone and silent under a sheet. For how long? For ever? An apparently eternal, inescapable nonexistence. Perhaps until, as is helpfully pointed out by one of the house's later tenants, the vaporisation of the Earth in some six billion years' time. Or maybe, not even then...

It's a fantastically glum film, pared right down to the basics: a 4:3 aspect ratio (with round corners), long takes with a static camera in which very little happens, one location, very low budget. Yet it's mesmerising throughout, enjoyable without having any laughs in it at all (the only actual joke is the name of the production company), slow without ever being dull, and genuinely sad. Granted, I think I may have missed the point from which things ultimately resolve themselves, and the rules governing how much interaction C can have with the physical world aren't entirely clear, but those are minor quibbles: this is a fascinating, (literally) deadpan, non-horror horror film. I enjoyed it immensely.

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