Brow Beat

A Sheet-Covered Casey Affleck Stars in the Trailer for A Ghost Story

It’s Casey Affleck under there, we promise.

A24

David Lowery’s A Ghost Story is both literally and figuratively haunting, a work of minimalist cinematic lyricism that probes the lingering effects of loss with delicate audacity. Although it could easily have been an experimental toss-off wedged between bigger projects, a way for the director of Pete’s Dragon to keep faith with his indie roots before heading off to shoot the heist thriller The Old Man and the Gun and a planned remake of Peter Pan, it turned out to be Lowery’s best movie to date, an audacious experiment that succeeds with nearly every risk it takes. Also, Casey Affleck spends approximately nine-tenths of the movie in a white sheet with cut-out eyeholes. (And yes, according to Lowery, that really is Affleck under there, at least most of the time.)

Hopefully, that, and the incandescent reviews A Ghost Story received out of Sundance, is enough to make you want to see it when it opens July 7. But if you need a little more encouragement, distributor A24 has released the first trailer for the film, and it’s a corker. Given that A Ghost Story is not a traditional narrative and that much of the thrill of watching it for the first time is the unexpected ways it moves through space and time, gives away a good number (though by no means all) of the film’s surprises.

If you’re already sold on the film, it’s best to simply bottle up that anticipation and save it for July, when a movie as odd and uncommercial as A Ghost Story will need your box-office support. But if not, feast your eyes on a sheet-covered Affleck pining over an oblivious Rooney Mara or a gregarious Will Oldham spieling on the nature of art and the cosmos. Have we mentioned that Kesha plays a character called “spirit girl”?

There’s no big twist for the A Ghost Story trailer to ruin, so it doesn’t, but genuine surprises are rare enough, and worth preserving until you can see them in the proper context. Here’s the trailer. Watch it, and then forget everything but your desire to see the movie.