The plot: C (Casey Affleck) has been killed in a car
accident. Coming back as a ghost, still covered in the sheet that he was left
with at the morgue, he returns to his house where his wife M (Rooney Mara) is
struggling to cope with her husband’s death. As C learns that he has become
more detached from the real world than he first realised, he is forced to come to
terms with his own fate and the regrets that are keeping him in this world.
Rather than going into a rundown of the cast as
per usual, I went to delve into the film’s main concept first. Mainly, how it
under no circumstances should work. I mean, between the extremely kitsch design
for the ghost and one of the production companies attached to the film being
called Scared Sheetless, this so easily could have devolved into a bad
experiment. And yet, that main idea sticks without any real effort required.
Not only is there an explanation for this in-universe, turning the sheet over
the ghost into a grim reminder of the body it was once attached to, Casey
Affleck ends up bringing a lot of character to it without any dialogue. The
eyes-cut-out face always had this sense of melancholy to it, and Affleck’s slow
shuffling across the set feels like he’s just drifting through the real world.
Like a ghost, fittingly enough.
This is also aided by the film’s visual style,
which I’m finding difficult to put into words without just explaining what is
shown. As such, I will do exactly that and give a specific example that ends up
setting the tone for the rest of the production. After C dies, we see M in the
kitchen. She unwraps a pie and, for the next five solid minutes of screen time,
we get a single unbroken shot of her sitting on the kitchen floor, eating the
pie. After the roughly five minute binge-eating session, she immediately runs
to the bathroom and throws up into the toilet.
Now, as kooky as this sounds on
paper, it ends up leaving a weird effect on the audience, one that only becomes
clear as the film goes on. What this, and many other similiarly-paced scenes,
are here to do is to keep the audience aware of the passage of time. Whether
it’s C and M cuddling in bed or the aforementioned pie-eating, these scenes are
shown in a deliberate way meant to make us aware of the fact that we are seeing
all of it, possibly more so than is necessary. Because this is how we perceive
time: In a singular, forward direction without the outside assistance of editing to cut
out the slower moments.
The ghost of C, on the other hand, doesn’t see
the world this way anymore. Instead, we see the world through his point-of-view
as being shuffled, with days and even weeks passing by in a matter of moments
and witnessing the distant past being as simple as walking into another room.
One of the most common ghost story tropes is that of ‘unfinished business’: The
matters that the ghost was unable or perhaps unwilling to resolve in their
lifetime, so their spirit lingers around trying to resolve it in another life.
That well and truly is at the heart of this film, as it takes our silent
protagonist (save for some subtitled conversating with another ghost, played by
Ke$ha… yes, seriously) through a rather painful process of letting go of the proverbial
chains that tie him to this plane of existence. Even as the story goes beyond
just her interactions with M and goes into both the past and future occupants
of the land, you get that sense that C should not still be here… and yet,
because of his unwillingness to shift in life, he is unable to even in death.
This is all rather compelling stuff, if
slightly goofy at times, but… I can’t lie: I found this near-impossible to
really get into. Having seen director/writer/editor David Lowery’s last film,
the recent Pete’s Dragon remake, I was honestly thrown for a loop at how
artistically inclined this production is. After learning that Lowery has worked
with filmmaker Shane Carruth of Looper and Upstream Color fame, Lowery having
co-edited the latter, this film’s style started to make sense. Unfortunately,
it also made more sense as to why I wasn’t that into it. Even though a lot of
this film exists for atmospheric purposes, focusing more on mood than anything
else, the pacing involved in going from moment to moment is painfully slow. This film is barely over
an-hour-and-a-half, and yet it felt like this thing was taking days to get
through.
I’d joke about how this was all totally intentional and meant to mess
with the audience’s sense of time as much as the main character’s, but that
would be underselling films that manage to do that concept better than this.
Films like Arrival, which toyed with non-linear storytelling to highlight just
how much film editing inherently screws with the perception of time, or the
adaptation of Slaughterhouse Five, which featured a character also detached
from the regular flow of time. I also don’t feel like making jokes at the
film’s expense because, unlike other incredibly slow films that end up rubbing
me the wrong way, there is genuine merit to be found here. Just not enough to
make me think that my time was well-spent watching it.
All in all, this will likely come down to a matter of
personal taste (more so than usual, at least) but I’m not too happy about this
one. The acting can get really good, the mood of the story is impeccable
set-up, and the way Lowery both textually and visually plays around with ghost
story archetypes is quite interesting to read into. However, as I’ve stated in
reviews past, I’m not big on slow films. Quite honestly, with very few
exceptions, this is one of the slowest-moving things I’ve sat through all year
and no amount of subtext is enough to make me engage with it because of that.
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