Casey Affleck plays a musician who dies in a car crash and comes back as a ghost, wrapped in a white sheet. Rooney Mara plays his wife, left behind in the house they shared. That is the whole premise of David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, and it is a premise that sounds simple until you see how much patience it asks of you.
The film runs 93 minutes, and it moves almost entirely at a crawl. Affleck’s ghost watches Mara grieve, move out, date again, and eventually marry. He cannot touch her, speak to her, or change anything. He can only drift through walls and watch the life he loved slip away. The film is about loss, memory, and the strange way time treats those who are still around and those who are gone.
Trailer, via A24.
The White Sheet
Affleck’s performance is a study in restraint. He spends most of the film motionless, eyes wide, mouth shut. His face does the work. When he first wakes as a ghost, he wanders through the hospital and passes a door of light. He looks at it, then turns away. The door closes. That single beat tells you everything about his character: he is trapped, he is desperate, and he is afraid of what letting go might mean.
Mara does the heavy lifting opposite him. Her M goes through stages of grief — anger, denial, acceptance — and Mara plays each one with a quiet intensity that never tips into melodrama. Their scenes together, rare as they are, carry the weight of the entire film. The chemistry between them is the engine, and it runs on barely a whisper.
The Other Ghost
The film introduces a second ghost, a woman covered in a flower-print sheet. She sits in the house next door and says she is waiting for someone, though she cannot remember who. This character is a small stroke of genius. She is a mirror for Affleck’s ghost, a being who is also trapped in time but with no memory of what she is waiting for. Her presence suggests that being a ghost is not a temporary condition but a permanent one, and that the longing for a return to life is something that never ends.
Lowery uses this ghost to extend the film’s themes beyond the central couple. She is a reminder that there are others who linger, unseen, unremembered, and that the world keeps turning even when it feels like it should stop.
Virginia Woolf and the Books
Books play a large role in the film. One scene has M finding a book lying open at “A Haunted House” by Virginia Woolf, a story about a ghostly couple whose love lingers beyond death. The coincidence is not accidental. Lowery is drawing a direct line between his own film and the literary tradition of ghosts as figures of enduring love. The books are not just props; they are the film’s argument, laid out page by page.
Later, M listens to one of Affleck’s songs and recalls the first time he played it for her. That moment is a tender echo of the earlier scene with the Woolf story. Both are about remembering love across the boundary between life and death.
The Family Who Moves In
The film’s middle stretch slows down further when a Spanish-speaking single mother and her young son and daughter move into the house. They eat, play piano, and celebrate Christmas. The children begin to sense the ghost’s presence and become frightened. These scenes are the film’s most purely atmospheric, and they are also its most difficult. Lowery is trying to build a world where a ghost can exist without explanation, and the result is often beautiful but opaque.
One night, Affleck’s ghost knocks a framed photo from the wall. It is a small act, but it is the only action he takes in the entire film. The film’s final image is of that fallen frame, and it is a powerful ending.
The Sound of Silence
Lowery’s direction is unhurried to the point of being nearly static. The camera rarely moves, and the film’s rhythm is slow enough that some viewers will find it exhausting. But the pacing is deliberate. The film wants you to feel the passage of time in a way that a standard narrative cannot. It is a movie about waiting, and it makes you wait.
The music, composed by Daniel Hart, is sparse and delicate. It swells during the emotional peaks but mostly stays out of the way. The sound design is minimal as well. There is no score to cue your feelings, no orchestral swell to tell you when to cry. The film trusts the images and the actors to do the work.
What Works
What A Ghost Story does best is create a feeling of presence. Affleck’s ghost is always there, always watching, and the film makes you feel that presence too. There is a strange intimacy in seeing a character observe a room without ever entering it. The film is at its strongest when it lets the images breathe and trusts the audience to sit with the silence.
The film’s final scenes, after Mara’s character has moved on and the house is occupied by strangers, are the most affecting. The ghost watches the new family live their lives, and the contrast between his stillness and their activity is devastating. It is a meditation on the idea that life goes on, and that the dead are never really gone, only forgotten.
Where It Falls Short
The slow pace is a double-edged sword. While it builds a strong atmosphere, it can also test your patience. Some scenes feel padded, and the film could have been tightened by ten or fifteen minutes without losing anything essential. The middle stretch, particularly the scenes with the new family, drag. Lowery’s commitment to his vision is admirable, but it sometimes feels like a refusal to serve the audience.
The film’s themes are also limited. It is a story about loss and memory, and it repeats those themes without much variation. The addition of the second ghost adds depth, but the film does not fully explore what that character means. It is a question the film raises and then leaves unanswered.
The Final Image
The film’s final image is a framed photograph, knocked from the wall. It is a small gesture, but it is the only action Affleck’s ghost takes in the entire film. The photo falls, and the screen goes dark. It is a powerful ending, a quiet punctuation mark on a film that has spent its runtime saying very little.
A Ghost Story is a film about patience, both the kind the audience must exercise and the kind the characters experience. It is not for everyone, and it is not trying to be. It is a small, careful, deliberately paced meditation on loss, and it succeeds at what it sets out to do.
| Character | Role |
|---|---|
| Casey Affleck | C / Ghost |
| Rooney Mara | M |
| Will Oldham | Second Ghost |
| McColm Cephas Jr. | Little Boy |
| Kenneisha Thompson | Doctor |
| Scene | Time in Film |
|---|---|
| Hospital wake-up | Early |
| M eats the pie | Middle |
| New family moves in | Middle |
| Christmas celebration | Middle |
| Final image | End |
The film is a quiet triumph. It is not flashy, and it does not need to be. It simply sits with its grief and its longing, and it asks the audience to do the same. That is a rare thing in cinema, and it is a gift.
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