A year since his first foray into the big-time with Pete’s Dragon, David Lowery returns to the indie scene with A Ghost Story. The film is, for the most part, constructed of long, often static shots of its central, unnamed couple (Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara). There’s an uncomfortably voyeuristic quality to these shots, as the camera hovers over the two as they make love, or crouches unseen as, in one painfully drawn-out shot, Mara munches on an entire pie on her kitchen floor in a quiet moment of shame and grief. While these long scenes will polarise audiences regarding their necessity, what they inarguably succeed in doing is to elicit an emotional response (even if that response is simply frustration).
