A Ghost Story (2017)
I thought the film would be mostly Rooney Mara moving slowly around her house with the ghost of Casey Affleck watching her. I was wrong. Halfway through the film goes in a different direction, and it really does become the ghost’s story. Once Mara leaves the film there’s a long stretch where it’s just a person under a sheet and I was worried it wasn’t going to recover from that, but it pulls something interesting and unexpected out of the bag in the final quarter.
There is a scene early on where we see Mara eat an entire pie that a friend has brought for her to eat because she is mourning and needs pie support. While she forks pieces of it straight from the tin into her mouth, sat on the floor with Affleck’s sheeted figure silently watching her, I started to cry, and I continued to cry for the entire scene. Eight minutes of pie eating and eight minutes of tears. That’s never happened to me before.
I chose the film because I’m thinking about death a lot at the moment. It was the release I needed. A beautiful film, truly.