This film really took me by surprise. I would’ve expected some scares from this film but to my surprise, that film wasn’t really about the typical “scares” I was expecting. It surprisingly got a big message behind all of it.
A Ghost Story (2017) by David Lowery talks about a deceased man who later becomes a ghost, goes back to his home and not only does he try and console his wife, but also goes through past memories of the house they were staying in too.
I actually watched "Before Sunset” (2004) by Richard Linklater a week before I watched this film and this film was the total opposite of this film. That film mostly relied on a lot on dialogue to continue the story. This film however, relied mostly on the landscape to tell the story to the audience, and I thought it was a smart take considering they covered a lot without excessive dialogue.
In the first part of the film, I thought that the ghost or known as “C”, would just be looking back at memories of her wife “M” but turns out, this film went for a whole different route. We get to see all the past memories of the house where different people used to live in the same suburban house. We also get to see, what I assume, the future too. We saw the house getting demolished to become a big office building and basically saw his home becomes a big metropolis.
One thing that caught me a little off guard was when the ghost neighbor said “I don't think they're coming back” and it suddenly disappears. I should’ve seen this coming but, I realized then that it was talking about how the ghosts can’t move on yet. When the houses were demolished, the ghost neighbor finally accepted that they should move on. Same goes for M’s ghost, as he finally got the note his wife left him and finally vanishes, showing that he’s finally accepting reality, and move on.
After reading Yi-Fu Tuan’s “Thought and Landscape”, it talked about how we can see reality in very different perspectives or angles, which I thought really applies to this film. He mentions that there are two different ways to see it which is the vertical and side view. The vertical view is more “domain, a work unit, or a natural system necessary to human livelihood,” while the side view is defined as “landscape as space in which people act, or as scenery for people to contemplate.” We really get to see and understand the landscape which is the house, in the eyes of the ghost in both views.
In conclusion, I’m honestly not the biggest fan of films doing less dialogue than what a typical film would need. However, I must say, this film did an excellent job without it anyway. I feel it would ruin the film and also loses the purpose of the film if there was too much dialogue.
This review is also posted in my Letterboxd! Click here to see the review.
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