Film reviews: A Ghost Story | Tom of Finland

A film about loss and letting go, David Lowery's melancholic A Ghost Story challenges us to reassess our preconceptions of how a '˜horror' movie should unfold

Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck (under a sheet) in A Ghost Story. Picture: Bret Curry

A Ghost Story (12A) ****

Tom of Finland (18) ***

It seems like every other month just now there’s an intriguing and subversive horror movie hitting cinemas. A Ghost Story is the latest, and perhaps the strangest. Written and directed by David Lowery – who broke through in 2013 with the Malick-riffing crime movie Ain’t Them Bodies Saints before remaking family weepy Pete’s Dragon for Disney last year – it sees him making yet another leftfield turn with a melancholic story about grief, told from the point of view of a ghost trapped in a single space yet unmoored in time.

Essentially a metaphysical horror movie, it’s low on traditional scares, but big on atmosphere, something intensified by how weird it all is. The ghost in question, for instance, looks like the cheapest Halloween costume imaginable, largely because this is exactly what it is: a guy in a white sheet with two eyeholes cut from it. Yet the person under the sheet is Casey Affleck (at least for part of the time), something that makes A Ghost Story the most perverse use of an A-list actor since Frank placed Michael Fassbender inside a giant papier-mâché head.

Affleck doesn’t start off this way. As the movie opens we’re privy to fragments of his and Rooney Mara’s slightly bohemian life together.

They’re a married couple who seem deeply in love, though it’s clear from the snatches of conversation we do get that there’s some tension between them, mostly concerning their modest Texan house, to which he feels more attached than she does.

Amplifying that tension is Lowery’s decision to shoot the film in a boxy aspect ratio rather than standard widescreen: even before the ghost arrives, there’s something haunting and constraining about this place, as if their spirit – or at least Affleck’s – is already trapped here.

Lowery makes that idea literal early in the film when his camera drifts over the scene of a road accident that has left Affleck’s character dead behind the wheel of his car outside his house. This is pretty much the last time we see his face. The next time we see his body it’s in the morgue, lying on a table, awaiting formal identification. Once Mara’s character leaves the room, we see his sheet-covered body sit up, the white material taking shape around him as he drifts through corridors unseen, eventually ending up back in his home, where he keeps watch over his grieving wife.

The film embraces a lot of the familiar ghost story tropes: flickering lights, creaking doors, floating crockery. But the decision to stick with the ghost’s perspective rather than Mara’s transforms the film into something more abstract and more cosmic. Time passes in huge swathes, new people come and go, new structures are erected and demolished, yet the ghost remains constant – a lonely soul, trapped for eternity, unsure of its purpose as the impermanence of everything around him becomes ever more apparent.

Despite its goofy simplicity, the costume proves unexpectedly expressive in this respect, with Lowery’s shooting style makes use of long static takes to emphasise the psychological trauma of being dislocated in time. As a result, it’s difficult to know how to judge Affleck’s performance. The ghost is often static too, and whenever he does move, it’s slow and deliberate. In interviews Lowery has admitted that having Affleck under the sheet didn’t always work and increasingly wasn’t necessary (in the final cut it’s a mix of Affleck and the film’s art director, David Pink). But the recent Oscar-winner’s ability to internalise trauma in his previous film, Manchester by the Sea, finds a parallel in A Ghost Story in his pre-death scenes, which frontload the film with an existential angst that pays off beautifully as the film reaches is head-scratcher of a conclusion. Mara – who co-starred with Affleck in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints – also does some of her most affecting work as her character reckons with both her marital frustrations and private grief, the latter giving rise to a remarkable scene early on in which her consumption of a pie in a continuous five-minute take becomes emblematic of the way we need to purge our fears and emotions in order to move on with our lives. Ultimately A Ghost Story, like all ghost stories, is a film about letting go. That this one requires audiences to let go of their own preconceptions of how a film like this should unfold is what makes it special.

One might think a based-on-fact film about an underground Finnish cartoonist whose amusingly lewd drawings of butch men in leather biker gear helped define a certain gay male aesthetic in the 1970s would make for a ribald piece of cinema. Tom of Finland, however, gives Touku “Tom” Laaksonen (Pekka Strang) the prestige biopic treatment with a fairly straight – so to speak – run through of the flashpoint moments that led to the creation of his titular nom de plume. Touku’s work was frequently dismissed as porn, but its high camp value also made it a celebratory symbol of sexual liberation, something that took on an even more important political dimension during the fearmongering of the Aids crisis. The film deals with all this in a very respectable way, but despite such formal conservatism, director Dome Karukoski deserves some credit for being true to its subject in his matter-of-fact portrayal of same-sex relationships. There’s nothing coy about the film, which also feels like an honest reflection of the way the Laaksonen’s legacy has been embraced by the Finnish government as an important part of the country’s cultural heritage.