A Ghost Story

Buddhism teaches that the realm of hungry ghosts (preta) is one of the six realms of cyclic existence. The hungry ghost has enormous appetite and a tiny throat. They are constantly aware of what they need and unable to consume it. They are stuck in proximity to what cannot satisfy them.

Lowery's ghost is a precise depiction. He is in the house. He cannot leave. He cannot communicate. He cannot interact with the world. He can only watch. He stays because there is something he needs to receive, and he cannot bring himself to leave until he has received it. The note in the wall is the food his throat cannot reach.

This is what attachment actually feels like. Not desire for what you can have. Aching presence in proximity to what is now permanently inaccessible. The Buddhist tradition is precise about why this is suffering. The soul that cannot release is condemned to repeat. The repetition is not punishment. It is the consequence of a particular state of mind that does not yet know it can stop.

The ghost does not know he can stop. He simply continues. He waits because he cannot do otherwise. This is one of the truest depictions of the dying mind ever rendered: the consciousness that cannot move on because it does not yet know what it is waiting for. Most people who are not dying live this way without realizing it.

The ghost experiences time non-linearly. He stands in one position. The room changes. New tenants move in. Years pass in seconds of screen time. He is propelled into the future. He is also propelled into the deep past — he watches the family that will eventually become his neighbors before they have been born, and he is still on the same plot of land when it was prairie.

Without a body, time has no traction. The body is what holds consciousness in sequence. The body's metabolism is what produces the experience of duration. Lose the body and time becomes a strange medium — not gone, but not measured the way the living measure it. Lowery is showing what the bardo states describe. The dead do not experience hours and days. They experience pulses of presence punctuated by enormous stillnesses.

This is also a teaching about what life looks like from the outside. When the ghost watches a hundred years pass in a single shot, the viewer suddenly perceives that all of these lives — the families, the parties, the children, the new owners — are flashes. From a frame that is large enough, every human life is a brief candle. The film is not making you feel small. It is making you feel the proportion correctly.

When the ghost finally circles back to the moment he is about to move into the house — alive, before his death — Lowery has revealed the structure. Time is a loop the ghost is walking. He has been on this property forever, in some form, doing this. The film is the slice of the loop we are allowed to see.

The wife, before she leaves the house, writes a note. She slips it into a crack in the doorframe and paints over it. The ghost watches her do this. He spends the rest of the film trying to pry it out. He scratches at the paint. He scratches at the wood. He fails. He waits. The house is demolished. He waits longer. A new house is built. He waits longer. He returns to past versions of the same land. He waits longer still.

Finally, in his own past, in his own lifetime, with his own wife about to leave, he gets the note out. He reads it. The contents are not shown to the audience. We do not need to know. What we needed to know was that he needed to know, and now he does.

He vanishes. The bedsheet falls. There is no body inside. He has been released.

This is the most precise depiction of attachment-and-release that cinema has produced. The release does not come from spiritual practice. It does not come from forgiveness or moral progress. It comes from finally receiving the specific piece of information the consciousness had been waiting for. The Buddhist claim is that all attachment has this structure. You are waiting for something. When you stop waiting, you stop being there.

Most people will not know what they are waiting for until they receive it. Lowery is honest about this. The film does not show you the note because the note is yours. Each viewer has their own. The film is the practice of waiting for it long enough to recognize it when it arrives.