Audacious 'Ghost Story' casts bizarre, often unsatisfying spell

An off-screen car crash interrupts the picturesque, suburban lives of a young couple in David Lowery's "A Ghost Story," marooning the deceased husband musician (Casey Affleck) in a kind of purgatory as a watchful, mostly benign ghost.

The movie is, inevitably, "the one where Casey Affleck spends most of the movie with a bedsheet over his head." With two holes for eyes, he resembles a last-minute Halloween costume. Such a simple, sheeted specter - as Hollywood ghosts go - is tantamount to a radical deviation from prevailing orthodoxy. There's no CGI, and nobody gets slimed. No, the most audacious display of cinematic extreme in "A Ghost Story" is a scene where the ghost watches his widowed wife (Rooney Mara), in a fit of grief and hunger, eat pie. For five minutes.

"A Ghost Story" may sound like a punchline. But it's an exceedingly earnest, meditative movie about big ideas - the nature of time, life's impermanence - that goes well beyond the intentionally dime-store costume design. It's an often transfixing, frequently unsatisfying fable that blends the fantastical with the banal.

Lowery shot the film secretly in between making Disney movies. It was designed like an audacious indie experiment, made with little expectation of triumph.

And "A Ghost Story," with fragmented scenes and leaps through time, does have the electric feel of something made off the radar and without a net. The early scenes between the couple - known only as M (her) and C (him) - have a cosmic backdrop, interspersed with shots of the sky at night, the humming of a quivering score of violins and the lush sunlight of Texas golden hour.

But on a beautiful morning, we find the husband slumped against the wheel outside their home. In the morgue, Lowery holds his shot on the body after the wife and doctors depart. A few moments later, the sheet-covered body sits up, walks down the hall and meanders his way home.

His purpose is far from clear. He stoically observes his wife's grief. Time moves slowly and then in giant leaps. She moves out; he stays. A family moves in. Years pass. It's the ghost - an increasingly sad figure - who's haunted. Grand jumps through time follow, beyond the house's destruction and back to the pioneer family who first rested there.

The question at the center of "A Ghost Story" is: What endures? And if nothing does, what's it all for?

It's possible to admire "A Ghost Story" for its pursuit of something profound, while being totally unmoved by it.

"A Ghost Story" is what it says it is, and it may well haunt you.

“A Ghost Story”

★ ★ ½

Starring: Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, Will Oldham

Directed by: David Lowery

Other: An A24 release. Rated R for language and violence. 87 minutes