There are a lot of arthouse movies about grief and grieving, and most of them are bad. A Ghost Story is so much more than that, but to understand what writer/director David Lowery (Pete’s Dragon, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) is playing at, you have to forget what you’ve learned from other grief narratives. A Ghost Story will take you somewhere, if you let it. Probably its most impressive quality is that it teaches you how to watch it.
Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara play “C” and “M,” a young married couple living in a quaint country house that might be haunted. We don’t know much more about them, other than C (Affleck) is some kind of composer, that he and M seem to be having relationship trouble, and that the two never, ever smile.