A Ghost Story (2017)

I watched Stephen Soderbergh’s Presence (2025) the other day, which has a terrific premise (a haunted-house ghost story shot exclusively from the ghost’s direct point of view) and tremendous execution on the camerawork that brings it to life (Soderbergh gets an amazing amount of expressiveness out of the way the camera glides around, its distance from the other characters, and what it chooses to focus on). But after sitting with it for a couple days, it still seems to me like the script could have done with a few more rounds of revision—maybe I’m missing something, but one major subplot seemed to have no real purpose, and while it’s hard to go into detail without getting into spoiler territory, let’s just say that I think that time could have been better spent developing certain other aspects of the characters and story that were more important. (That aside, if “Soderbergh shoots a ghost story from the ghost’s point of view” sounds like it’s up your alley, it’s certainly interesting and worth a watch—the runtime is all of 85 minutes, and it lands a satisfying ending.)

Anyway: It also brought to mind David Lowery’s excellent A Ghost Story, which I unconditionally loved—it has a similar quiet, lonely melancholy and haunted-house situation, along with one prominent feature that really seems like it shouldn’t work: After Casey Affleck’s character is killed in a car accident early on, he spends the rest of the movie as a silent, often motionless ghost, played as him literally draped in a big white bedsheet with eyeholes cut in it. But this in fact works fantastically well—the result is surprisingly evocative and moving, and it ends up going places that I at least did not even remotely expect. And it’s for sure one of those movies that falls into the “there’s nothing else quite like this” bucket.