There is the cycle of life as Mafusa had
revealed in his hard knocks school sermon to his son in the famed Disney
entertainer, The Lion King and then there is the cycle of after-life, a
rather long and lonely affair as revealed in the film
A Ghost Story written and directed by David Lowery.
It is a slow gliding film, almost a eulogy to
ghosts whose physical form in the movie is appropriated from the
home-made cheese cloth and ping pong ball figures hung on trees on
Halloween. Several times while watching the movie, despite
being a fan of eulogies and poetry in general, I fell prey to the
convenience of the fast forward button.
No, don’t misunderstand, it is a good movie, worth
watching and well made on a shoe-string budget. Writing, editing and
direction have stepped in to make up for the dollar deficit. All that
lack of action and lifelessness you can only expect
from Casey Affleck has been realized in the lead role which puts these
specific traits of Affleck to good use. Rooney Mara has an exceptionally
powerful scene with a vegan chocolate pie. There are no other actors
worth mentioning other than a couple of bed
sheets.
It is a haunting movie in a literal as well as in a
figurative sense. I couldn’t fall asleep after finishing the movie. Not
because I started hallucinating imaginary shapes in the dark of
my bedroom or kept getting startled by creaky
settling noises our floor boards love making after midnight (in other news English is a funny language
😉)
but because the movie essentially gave me the message, “You think life
sucks, eh? Wait till you get a dose of after-life.” Such a downer. I have
been an ardent researcher and reader of Sam Parnia, the Scole Experiment, Raymond Moody and the
like. David Lowery has single-handedly snuffed out the romance of
after-life from my mind.
As an easterner (from eastern hemisphere) by birth,
the cycle of after-life is not an alien concept to me. What kept me
awake at night after ‘A Ghost Story” is the absence of an escape door,
which all the Eastern philosophies comfortingly
provide us – whether it is moksha in Hinduism or nirvana in Buddhism.
That one phone call to your lawyer in the sky, where is it David Lowery?
0 comments:
Post a Comment