A Ghost Story

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Today I tried ChatGPT for the first time and asked it for some movie recommendations based on my likes and dislikes. This was the top suggestion.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
First off, I'd like to say, that I think this was a pretty solid recommendation. It definitely hits that sweet spot between surreal imagery and a coherent narrative while also trying to serve up an emotional gutpunch all at the same time. Very satisfied with the recommendation.

That said, this movie was kind of painful.

Now, overall, it's not a bad movie, the premise was a pretty solid hook. Despite looking like a horror movie from the outside, it most definitely is not one. We follow Main Guy and Main Girl who live together, but plan to move soon, shortly after their relationship is established Main Guy dies in a car crash directly outside their home. Later he awakens in the hospital as a stereotypical bedsheet ghost, invisible, silent, and can only communicate to other ghosts in subtitles. He appears to be offered a portal elsewhere, but he doesn't enter.

Main Ghost returns to his home to watch Main Girl live out her life, up to and including writing out a secret note and hiding it in a wall before permanently moving away.

We pan transition through various phases of the house and it's subsequent occupants and loosely absorb information about the extent of Main Ghost's ability to interact with the real world as well as the fact that something in his psyche must be anchoring him to it.

After what must be many years he finally manages to pull the note from the wall, but is interrupted when the home is demolished and we timeskip to a skyscraper in a city deep into the future. Main Ghost jumps off the roof and we time travel back into the distant past for some reason.

After observing some Pre-American settlers killed and decomposed we find ourselves back in the house we started in and Main Ghost starts observing Main Ghost observing Main Girl. He cuts away from the eternal viewing party to pull the note from the wall, reads it, and disappears. Cut to credits.

The WORST part about all of this is that we never get to see what's on the ****ing note.

It reminds me of The Frame, which drummed up one character's ability to play music and finally at the climax the movie is completely ****ing silent like it was hit by a Youtube DMCA notice.

This was the perfect opportunity to present something that's clever, or thought provoking, or heartbreaking, or something as unimaginatively basic as "I love you", but we don't even get that. The writer's cheap out, we never see the note, and the movie ends. I HATE THAT.


And I especially hate it because this movie is otherwise so slow, so all of the weight that you've poured so heavily into every dragging scene just POOF!s when Main Ghost reads the note.

There are shots in this movie, mainly at the beginning, that go on FOREVER. Obviously the most poignant one is him eventually awakening in the hospital, but we also get a shot of the couple just snuggling in bed for a couple decades, and even less importantly we get a shot of Main Girl just dragging a big ****ing box to the curb which itself drags on for several thousand eons.

I deadass expected we were about to learn that she killed him and stuffed his body in the box for all of the emphasis that was put on that shot, but nope, that shot seems to serve absolutely no purpose in the movie.

Apart from stuff like that, I actually did like the editing of this movie. We get some good transitions, some excellent smash cuts without any backing track or musical stings, there were a lot of scenes that could have had music, but didn't and I don't feel like they needed any.

The presentation was kinda weird. The simple ghost costume is about as budget as you can imagine, but they manage to make it look sad rather than scary. On the flipside, this movie is cropped to nearly 1:1 and there's some bullshit explanation for it on Wikipedia about the "claustrophia of being stuck in a box for eternity", which is just pretentious nonsense. That implies that 4:3 aspect ratio movies and earlier were intended to, or unintentionally, conveyed any amount of claustrophobia.

Also, we never see him in a box, let alone the one box they show Main Girl dragging around for 17 trillion lightyears onscreen. What's claustrophobic about his existence when we see him inside, outside, and well above his house, and nowhere near a coffin?

Some of the movie logic falls apart after the time reversal too.

First off, let's assume I'm mistaken about the time reversal. Wikipedia states that the Pre-American girl is humming a song he wrote, which suggests that this is either the EXTREME deep future, as hypothesized by Random Party Dude #7, OR, even deeper, an Eternal Return phenomenon, which I find more appealing, but is less substantiated by the story.

So, if this is the future, why can he see his past self?
And if this is the past, why can he see his past ghost self?
And better yet, why did it take him years to pull the note from the wall the first time but mere seconds the second time?

Main Girl specifically painted over the crack in the wall which is what made it difficult to retrieve, did she just not do it in this timeline? Why was Past Main Ghost slower to act on that than Future Past Main Ghost?

Anyway, this is one of those movies that pours every ingredient into a big payoff ending only to shit out a "WE'LL LEAVE IT UP TO YOUR IMAGINATION!!!" bit instead.

It seriously harms my opinion of the entire movie up to now if the payoff it's been alluding to for over an hour is nonexistent, and that's why this ending is going to tank my rating something fierce.

For what it's worth though, this movie would be significantly worse if he ghost had an inner monologue.


Final Verdict:

[Okay]