Film

A Ghost Story

Name: A Ghost Story
Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Romance
Released: 2017
Cast: Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, McColm Cephas Jr., Kenneisha Thompson, Grover Coulson

Fantasy
Drama
Romance
Slow-burning

A Ghost Story turns grief into architecture: a man dies, becomes a sheet-draped ghost haunting his own house, and watches decades collapse into an afternoon while his widow slowly moves on. It's slow, silent, almost unbearably patient — long static shots, a famous pie-eating scene played in real time. Less a story than a meditation on how little a lifetime weighs against geological time. For patient viewers who want stillness over plot.

TMDb rating

3.5

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you are drawn to patient, quietly strange films where grief is handled through stillness, odd humour and long looks rather than plot.

Skip it if you need characters to talk things through or a story that keeps moving, since dialogue is sparse and very little happens on the surface for long stretches.

What it asks of you: Patience above all: it runs ninety-three minutes but feels stretched, with long static takes, a boxy old-fashioned frame, and silences you have to sit inside.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind2004

Grief and love reshuffled through memory instead of time — a couple erasing each other only to find the ache resurfaces anyway. It's the emotional cousin of the ghost's helpless watching, dressed in colour and wit.

But It's talkative, structurally playful, and often funny — the opposite of the ghost's silence, if you want the mood to stay hushed.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind poster

Manchester by the Sea2016

Affleck again, this time fully present and destroyed by it — a study of a man who can't move past a single loss, told with the same unhurried, unsentimental patience.

But There's no ghost, no metaphysics, just plain unrelenting grief — harder and sadder without the film's abstraction to soften it.

The Tree of Life2011

Malick's cosmic scale-shifting — from a single family's sorrow to the birth of the universe — is the clearest ancestor of the ghost's centuries-in-a-blink perspective.

But Even more fragmented and impressionistic; if the pie scene tested your patience, this asks for a lot more of it.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from A Ghost Story

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir1947

Same premise inverted — a ghost bound to a house, watching a life he can't share — but told with 1947's warmth and dialogue instead of 2017's mute stillness.

The genre's founding text: a ghost haunts a widow's house, tender and funny and unmistakably in love with the woman living there instead of the one he lost.

But Old Hollywood gloss, a script that explains its feelings instead of withholding them — the tonal opposite of the silence you just sat through.

Arrival2016

A quietly devastating sci-fi film about learning to live with time non-sequentially, where grief and memory bend the plot itself instead of just colouring it.

But It has a clear narrative engine and a genre payoff the ghost never offers — less pure mood, more mystery to solve.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives2010

Ghosts, past lives, and the dead sitting calmly at the dinner table with the living — Weerasethakul treats the supernatural with the same matter-of-fact hush.

But Thai, dreamlike, and even less interested in explaining itself; some will find it opaque rather than moving.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives poster

Personal Shopper2016

Kristen Stewart waits for a sign from her dead brother in a film that treats haunting as ambiguous and unresolved rather than spectacular.

But It flirts with thriller mechanics the ghost never bothers with, and its ending divides people sharply.

Lost in Translation2003

Not about death, but about the same suspended, out-of-time loneliness — two people adrift in a life that's moving on without them.

But Warmer and funnier than anything here; if you wanted more grief and less wistfulness, it'll feel like a lighter meal.

The Fountain2006

Aronofsky's operatic, unabashedly earnest take on love outlasting death across centuries — the maximalist cousin to the ghost's minimalism.

But Where the ghost whispers, this shouts — big visuals, big emotion, and a sincerity some find overripe.

First Reformed2018

Schrader's slow-burn study of a man hollowed out by grief and doubt, shot with the same austere stillness and dread of time running out.

But Bleaker and more theological, building to a jolt of violence the ghost's story never approaches.

The Leftovers2014

Both treat time and loss as structurally strange — the show fractures years and perspectives the way the ghost's afterlife fractures a single house across centuries.

Three seasons of people trying to keep living after an inexplicable, unresolved loss — grief stretched into sprawling serialised television instead of compressed into ninety minutes.

But It's a long commitment, angrier and noisier than the ghost's hush, and its ambiguity can be maddening rather than soothing.

Ghost1990

Same skeleton — dead man, grieving lover, ghost who can't quite reach her — stripped of ambiguity and dressed as pure Hollywood melodrama.

The unabashedly commercial version of the same idea — a dead man lingers to protect the woman he loves, played for tears, romance, and one iconic pottery wheel.

But Broad, sentimental, occasionally silly — everything the arthouse ghost story refuses to be, for better or worse.