David Lowery is the mastermind behind this nearly genreless film, writing and directing a movie that is at times akin to something more experimental. The story is simple enough: Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara (curiously titled "C" and "M" in the credits, respectively) live in a small bungalow in the rural plains of Nowhere, USA. Despite plans to relocate to a bigger house, C's life is suddenly cut short offscreen in a violent car crash just outside his driveway. M goes to identify his body at the morgue, and no sooner does she leave than the body of C rises and slowly marches back home, invisible to everyone else, assuming the position of spirit or one who haunts those who survived him. He stands and watches M deal with the loss. He sees her friends come and go. He can do nothing but watch, listen, observe... Time is fleeting, and years pass by as though C is simply passing from room to room. When M moves out, C cannot. He watches at dwellers come and go, the house is destroyed, and the city slowly expands to replace a once country home with a towering skyscraper.
Despite the film's marketing and trailers, there's no way to advertise for a film so quiet, so internal. This is in many ways a story of a man who loves a woman even past the grave and yet it isn't a movie that lends itself to plot. The camera keeps rolling through long, motionless takes that make us question the very reasoning of it. In the film's most memorable scene, Rooney Mara eats nearly a whole pie on her kitchen floor in real time. Bite. By. Bite. I might question a director that makes such blatantly anticlimactic choices, but by the time the movie ended, it worked.
There are a couple scenes that attempt to dig out a deeper meaning, scenes that effectively blanched my ever-growing intrigue. The one that sticks in my mind shows a house party many years after C has died. He observes a drunk partygoer making existential remarks about the ultimate fate of humanity. The minutes-long monologue seems to work against the very grain of the script. We know C is a ghost, and we know why ghosts remain on earth. To waste valuable film time to simply address this very issue is counter-productive. It's repetitive. I'd much prefer the painfully slow shot of a M eating a pie.
As time progresses, so does C find he can maneuver back and forth through the eras. He even journeys back in time to find a pioneer family seemingly plotting out the land in order to build a cabin for themselves. C watches a young girl draw something, hide it under a rock, and then abandon it. It conjures up the memory of M leaving a note hidden behind the wall just before moving away. We want to know what is written here, what special message these two girls found so pertinent to have them remain hidden. In both cases, we will never know.
I found myself pondering the movie after it finished, and I will admit that I found the movie much more enjoyable as a whole than as separate parts. Each scene, whether brief or extended, builds up another block that ultimately leaves us with a surprisingly emotional climax in which a white sheet simply falls to the ground and the credits begin to roll. It makes sense if you have paid attention, and packs a punch in a way I wasn't expecting. Many movies have toyed around with the idea of life after death. Never before (I think) has it been so brilliantly analyzed by solely utilizing the way life continues on in death's absence. C ultimately discovers that despite how early his life was cut off, it wasn't all for nothing.
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