Written and directed by David Lowery, A Ghost Story came out in 2017 starring Academy Award-Winning actor, Casey Affleck, and Rooney Mara. This film was a step away from the traditional moving-picture horror films the audience would expect from the title. Because usually, a ghost tale implies that one is before something gothic and horrifying; a love story, maybe, in the same sense that David Foster Wallace meant when he said that every love story is, in essence, a ghost story. But the director here puts it in more simplistic terms of vision. After all, his main character is a ghost in a Halloween-costume bed-sheet. By that he aims at clarifying that the idea of haunted places, the passage of time, and this very personal, specific image of a ghost made-at-home carry homage to the 7-year-old Lowery whose first film ever was a home-made movie starring his brother as the ghost in a bed-sheet haunting their house. So, in a sense, this film is immensely personal where it is akin to remaking an old version of a childhood ghost story because the notion of an imaginary ghost friend is utilised and has now developed into an A24 production film. The movie is also eerily universal because the image of a haunted house extends to include one’s own dwelling on earth; in a limited span of time.
But, odd as it may sound, the 21st century A Ghost Story unintentionally carried homage to a modernist text written in the past century. Known with her obsession with the concept of Time, and being the revolutionary modernist she was, Virginia Woolf made Time a character on its own in her narratives. ‘A Haunted House’ appeared in the 1921 short-story collection Monday or Tuesday. It is an unconventional ghost story where Woolf introduces a pulsating house where two ghostly couple live. The very precise short story starts with the line: “Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly couple.” Lowery took that first bit of the line and included it literally in his film’s opening credits. So, by that does one expect a literatim adaptation? Now, in an interview with the director, he was asked about this particular opening quote and if he meant for his film to parallel the text by Woolf to which he replied:
I actually found that story after I had already written the screenplay, and Virginia Woolf is one of my favourite authors and that was just a story of hers I had never read; never heard of before. But I wanted to reference her at some point because what she does with time in her stories had a big effect on me (1:38-2:11).
Thus, it is safe to say that Woolf’s spirit was somehow reincarnated through time to indirectly inspire an adaptation (“David Lowery on A GHOST STORY”).
In ‘A Haunted House,’ the narrator, which one supposes is a female, claims to be able to hear a ghostly couple roaming a house, searching for a buried treasure; they move from upstairs to the garden and appear to reminisce over the bed where they once slept, centuries ago. On that same bed the present-day couple now sleep. Woolf is thus weaving the past into the present by introducing a circular Time. The narrator confides that “you” could never actually see the ghosts, but just reflections of them in apples and leaves in the sunlit windows. She then imagines the ghostly couple standing over her as she sleeps, and, holding a lamp over the bed of the living couple, the ghosts pause, still seeking ‘their hidden joy’. Then, the narrator wakes up and feels that she has solved the mystery: the buried mystery is the “light in the heart.”
‘A Haunted House’ seems to be Woolf’s attempt at conveying the feeling of sensing something on the edge of consciousness. Firstly, she had her narrator seem only attuned to the presence of the ghostly couple when she is in states of semi-consciousness: She (the narrator) is either engrossed in reading a book, or just waking up. This echoes Woolf’s “nothing exists outside us except a state of mind”—in the words of Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway. Secondly, the “whatever hour you woke” line is indicative of someone waking at any hour; daydreaming, insomniac, or napping, all of which make them arguably more prone to confusing dreams with reality.
On reading this very short short-story, one notices that Woolf’s language is almost that of a prose-poem; the rhythmical prose beats like a heart with the recurrent refrain ‘“Safe, safe, safe,” the pulse of the house beats softly.’ The pulse of the house keeps reassuring the ghostly couple that the treasure is buried “in the room,” and that “the treasure yours.” So much so that with the couple reunited: “Safe, safe, safe,” the heart of the house beats proudly. “Long years—” he sighs. “Again you found me,” the focus shifts from the pulse of the house to the ‘heart’ of the house that now pulsates and embraces them.
In the broader scheme of matters, ending a ghostly story with “the light in the heart,” phrase subverts the way one expects a ghost story’s finale to be. One is horrified by a supernatural element that is not ghastly per se, but rather psychologically disturbing and provocative. Having the story ending in a light tone renders it a love story. Then again, given its lack of plot, precision, and prose-poetry style, it is hardly a ‘story’ at all. Also, Woolf herself was interested in cinema as a means of expression, so maybe that would help in fathoming her style in this specific story.
Moving on to the movie, unlike the plot-driven films of the same year such as: Phantom Thread (2017), or Dunkirk (2017), A Ghost Story was idea-driven. The film starts with the quote from Woolf’s story appearing on screen with Roonery Mara’s voiceover: “When I was little, and we used to move all the time, I’d write these notes, and I would fold them up really small, and I would hide them in different places so that if I ever wanted to go back there’d be a piece of me there waiting.” Lowery’s idea for this film was based on this realm of failing to let go. He recalls in one of the interviews that prior to that summer he shot the movie in; he had to move out of the apartment he rented with his wife in Texas. Lowery mentions that he did not want to move out, and was immensely moved as it was the first house he moved into with his wife after they got married. To him, the film was much like a therapeutic experience where he wonders why he gets too attached to physical places, and the memories he has to leave behind (“David Lowery Talks About A Ghost Story” 7:25-8:02). Did he leave notes in the walls like Rooney Mara does in the film for the future him to visit one day, then? When Mara’s character asks Casey’s about what he likes about their house, he replies, “History? . . . Honey, we’ve got history” (1:21:58-1:22:06).
The idea of a ghost from Lowery’s stance is that it is a “wonderful vehicle for communicating all sorts of ideas about who we are, where we go, what the meaning of life is;” so much so that the ghost in the bed-sheet element has a bittersweet effect to it (6:37-6:45). Costume-wise, the bed-sheet ghost was tailor-made with the actor(s) having to put on a helmet beneath, and wear a heavy pile of multiple king-bed sheets so that the ghost figure is as ghostly. There are only two ghosts in the film, Casey Afflick’s ghost, and the neighbour ghost played by Lowery himself, which the cast called grandma ghost for it had a floral bed-sheet on. So, the ghost is funny in shape, pathetic and human in content. It is funny because of the costume and pathetic because its experienced time is out of joint.
The film can be summarised in three master-scenes: The cuddling scene, the pie scene, and the finale; tracing the music element throughout. The pillar that can combine all three together is Time, again. In the first part of the film, when the husband character is still alive, the wife is all the time suspicious of the noises in the house, to which the husband often reacts calmly. One night, once the husband agrees to his wife’s wish to move out, they hear a smash in the piano in the living room, hurry there; frightened, and then go back to bed. The focal point is in the extended moment (an almost 5-minute shot) the audience witness, as the camera hovers over the couple cuddling in bed, this intimate moment, and sense that there is another presence in this house; watching the characters as well (08:30-11:37). I personally favour this scene because it is so humanly poignant, it is beautiful; especially when knowing the husband dies in a car accident the following scene.
What makes analysing this movie challenging is that the more one writes, the more absurd it seems because I believe the visual experience is only worth watching, and writing does not do it justice. Nonetheless, to move on to the pie scene, one needs to propose two notions. First of which is the effect of the 1 33 1 ratio. It was intended by Lowery to amplify the sense of claustrophobia with the curved edges to emphasise the fact that the screen is square-shaped. It adds a degree of nostalgia— one of old photographs and sentimental vignettes. It also visually calls eyes’ attention to the centre of the screen; aesthetically it adds to the ghostly presence of the film with its old tiny polaroid look and, thematically, it shows how the main characters are stuck in a box, considering that the movie is about attachment and the process of letting go (“The AtZ Show”6:04-6:31). Secondly is the idea of haunting and its relation to the passage of time. In the pie scene (25:33-30:54), Mara sits and eats a pie in what seems like forever. There is no music in the scene one feels they are watching something private—something they are not supposed to be watching like a home-movie for instance. Why are we watching this, Lowery? How long do we need to watch Rooney Mara eat a pie to know Rooney has eaten the pie? Then again, is not that what grieving does to people? This is a woman whose husband has just passed away; she is experiencing loss in a scene that can break one down into bits and pieces if one tries to fathom how time passes when one mourns.
The ghost’s character, then, pats Mara in her sleep, in an attempt to express empathy. Prior to the husband’s death, the audience is not aware whose ghost that is. Was it there while the husband was alive? But when he dies, one learns it was the husband’s all along. As the wife tries to move on, dates a guy once; the husband-ghost gets into a temper tantrum and starts throwing books out of shelves, Woolf’s book comes in front of Mara; it opens on selected phrases of the short story that the camera brings into focus:
Death was the glass; death was between us; coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened. He left it, left her, went North, went East, saw the stars turned in the Southern sky; sought the house; found it dropped beneath the Downs. (Woolf)
Standing there, overwhelmingly out of time, the ghost experiences life all at once. The husband-ghost can jump off of a building and travel the opposite direction in time before the house was even built. He is neither dead nor alive, but rather caught between life and death; suspended in an in-between, split state; “hundreds of years ago” he might have once lived in this house. But now that Death has visited the house, a glass barrier stands between its inhabitants. Even when it comes to the editing style, instead of applying the conventional fades that would allude to the passage of time like one sees in other movies, the director ignores the rules and resorts to hard cuts; showing one that the ghost experiences everything collectively.
In the lyrics to ‘I Get Overwhelmed”— a single by Dark Rooms, Daniel Hart, the composer of the film’s music, presents a song that is almost a rewriting of both the film and the original Woolf text:
Are you runnin’ late?
Did you sleep too much?
All the awful dreams
Felt real enough
Is your lover there?
Is she wakin’ up?
Did she die in the night?
And leave you alone?
Alone (1-9).
Did you sleep too much?
All the awful dreams
Felt real enough
Is your lover there?
Is she wakin’ up?
Did she die in the night?
And leave you alone?
Alone (1-9).
In this verse, there is a hint at the presence of two lovers who are racing time; one is running late, while the other leaves [him] in the night. In the movie, the husband is a music composer, and the new house inspires him with the vocals and music to this song. In a scene where Mara, again, wishes for them both to decide leaving this house together, the husband postpones arguing and hands her headphones to listen to this song.
In his review of the film, the British film critic Robbie Collin maintains that A Ghost Story is “derived from this idea that the ghost’s life has been knocked out of joint and he is stuck in this place watching Time carry on without him and the film stresses how strange an idea it is that time could ever progress one; being in it (4:51-5:10 “A Ghost Story reviewed by Robbie Collin”). The film, in Collin’s words, does that with entire simplicity and almost entirely visually. A clear example of that would be the aforementioned song Casey’s character composed cut between Mara listening to it a moment after he composed it, and another time lying on her back after he is dead. Lowery cuts between these two events (scenes) as if they happened simultaneously. Mara, lying on the floor then, reaches her back with her finger brushing the hymn of his sheet (the ghost’s), and it is in this scene that something as simple as a piece of music can allow one to almost reach through time, and touch something that has already passed (40:34-42:22).
Also, the ‘Safe, safe, safe,’ melody at the end of the film is akin to the movie talking. Once the ghost finds the note the wife leaves in the wall, he dissolves. When interviewed, Mara never remembered what she had written on the note she leaves in the crack in one of the house’s walls. Lowery wanted the note to be truly personal in the sense that it could only mean something to Casey’s character (the later-to-be ghost) when he finds it in the wall. The ghost is ghostly only in that one time his temper tantrums make him wreak havoc and throw dishes at people; terrifying kids. And he only finds solace when he twice communicates with the grandma ghost with subtitles (because who knows how ghosts communicate, anyway) when they both learn that they are waiting for a Godot that never comes. She does not remember what she was waiting for or whom. And when her house is wrecked to pieces, she, too, dissolves.
With moments beamed out of the past into the present, a weird sense of past and present coexist to render this film both light-hearted and ennui. All in all, this paper is thus attributed to the ones who loved beyond measure and left, to friends who left remnants of themselves in the house that is one’s soul; to childhood memories that are fleeting, and lastly, to the light in the heart, pulsating “Safe, safe, safe . . . the treasure yours.” Here is to good films marveling at the art of letting go. To a private project that Lowery meant to be personal, but became universal because it encapsulated original human emotions in simplistic means of visual language and music.
Works Cited
“A Ghost Story (2017) ENDING EXPLAINED.” YouTube, uploaded by The AtZ Show, 14 Jul 2017, < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSU26_KN6g8&t=392s.>
“A Ghost Story reviewed by Robbie Collin.” YouTube, uploaded by kermodeandmayo, 11 Aug 2017, < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2ArkbIuu7Y&t=354s.>
“David Lowery on A GHOST STORY.” YouTube, uploaded by Inside The Story, 21 Jul 2017,
“I Get Overwhelmed- Dark Rooms (A ghost story).” YouTube, uploaded by Jonathan Yule, 29 Mar 2017, < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrsV8N-EkXE.>
Lowery, David, director. A Ghost Story. A Ghost Story, A24 Production, 2017,
Woolf, Virginia. “A Haunted House, and Other Short Stories, by Virginia Woolf.” A Haunted House, and Other Short Stories, by Virginia Woolf : chapter1, <https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91h/chapter1.html>
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