A Ghost Story

When a young man (Casey Affleck) dies in an auto accident, his spirit, still wearing the sheet that covered his body in the morgue, returns to his house and lover (Rooney Mara), lingering in the house even after she moves away and others move in, through demolition and change – for centuries, in fact. It’s hard to imagine the audience writer-director David Lowery had in mind for this intensely personal meditation on time and the human longing for immortality; maybe, like the greatest moviemakers, he made this movie just because he wanted to see it. Lowery presents his tale matter-of-factly, weaving a profoundly haunting spell as his lonely ghost stalks into the distant future and the unremembered past. The movie is an utterly unique masterpiece, freighted with inchoate meaning and glimpses of eternity. J.L.