A Ghost Story

Wednesday 28 May at 7.30pm

David Lowery | USA | 2017 | 88 mins | M offensive language

This profoundly cinematic ghost story tracks the progress of a spirit who can’t let go of the woman he loved and the house they shared, evoking a moving sense of existential disquiet.

“Working in secret and on a micro-budget, the director of Pete’s Dragon and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints has evoked a profound eeriness from the most minimal and intimate of means. As the ghost of a young husband (Casey Affleck) observes the grief of his partner (Rooney Mara) and then lingers through subsequent tenancies of the house they shared, the helpless ghost’s attachment to the place he loved becomes increasingly impersonal and unsettled. Lowery’s theme is realised in delicate, folkloric images of a distinctly American paradise lost, its hushed mood disrupted by abrupt bursts of activity—Will Oldham on a brilliant jag as a drunken doom theorist—and radical bends in time.”—Bill Gosden, New Zealand International Film Festival 2017

“A Ghost Story is filmmaking that challenges and exhilarates, a potent reminder of how many new places film can still be taken even after a century of people working in the medium.”—Dominik Suzanne-Mayer, Consequence of Sound