Last night’s maritally divisive ectoplasm on Netflix Disk: A GHOST STORY (2017). An actual work of art, I think, but not a whole lot of fun.

Casey Affleck is a young husband who gets slammed by another car on his way out of his driveway, dies, and rises from the morgue slab, an actual low-rent Halloween-style ghost, with an all-concealing sheet draped over him. He spends all but a few minutes of this film concealed in this way, watching in mute stunned shock as he wife mourns, as he moves away, as a new family moves in, as the whole march of human life moves on without him. There is one other ghost, a child-sized figure draped in another sheet, whose communications with him are conveyed via subtitles. They are both waiting for their loved ones to come back to them, to see them, but it is course not to be.

The character of the wife is played by Rooney Mara, who after the husband’s death says almost nothing, because there is of course no reason for her to walk around her house having conversations with herself. There is a killer scene where she sits on the floor and devours an entire pie delivered by a compassionate neighbor; the camera lingers on her throughout the consumption of that pie, a damned serious piece of business that gives her no pleasure or relief, while the draped form of her dead spouse watches invisibly in the distance. It’s a great one-take scene, riveting because of the mundanity of the action and its emotional undertone, and its extreme length is one of the reasons it works.

And it, alas, underlines both the film’s primary strategy and its chief weakness, its stillness. There are an awful lot of scenes that are just the shrouded ghost standing silent in empty rooms, underlining that this damnation, this endless waiting, goes on for years. The movie could drop literally a third, maybe a half, of its running time just by eliminating the frames without movement and not lose any plot, but then, the suffocating silence is also its source of power.

I thought it was a flawed masterpiece and damned difficult to sit through. Judi thought it was a promising idea and even more damned difficult to sit through; she didn’t make it. I imagine that some of you will get half an hour in, cry, “To hell with this,” and press the eject button, and I won’t blame you a bit. I imagine that some others will watch rapt, aware that you’re watching one of the most remarkable supernatural films ever made — let alone one of the most remarkable performances, given that its lead actor is for most of his screen time obliged to communicate any emotions his character is feeling with minor shifts of his head. I believe that every reaction from aggravation to deep emotion is wholly appropriate. It’s a great film, I think. Just be aware that you might not find it a wholly watchable one

| Category Horror