‘A Ghost Story,’ Phoebe Bridgers’ ‘Stranger in the Alps’ & My Existential Dread

David Lowery’s A Ghost Story is fucking brutal. Rarely have I experienced the impending doom of my own death or felt completely strangled by time’s merciless grip around my throat until I was numb all over. The 90-minute feature, starring Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, a nameless couple whose lives are nothing more than trivial, walls up collective existential dread with a thick, caked-on mortar. It’s isolation and desperation grinding against one another in the ashy aftermath of catastrophe, and even the most mundane moments shroud with deep, gutting, tremendous sorrow; Mara’s character scarfs down an entire pie for five minutes and 38 seconds, from the time she crumples up the aluminum foil covering until she pukes it back up. It’s in those intimate, and frankly dull, moments that you’re sucked into this suffocatingly airless abyss, clawing for a way out of the imposing blackness with nowhere, really, to go but farther down, down, down.

When my father died, I couldn’t breathe. I kneeled by his bedside, surrounded by my eldest sister, uncle, aunt, cousins, and the preacher’s apprentice launched into a songbird hymn. Those three minutes or so torment me. I imagine myself sometimes trapped in that purgatory, eerily pristine angles of the hospice a fortress, and my mind must writhe around in the mental mud that keeps spilling from its pen. Those three minutes or so were excruciating and felt like… eternity. Time ceased, or at least my perception of it did.

Lowery plays with time in an equally ruthless way. It’s like boiling water on the stove. It never starts to boil until you’ve left the room. After a deadly head-on collision, Affleck’s character sheds his human form, and perhaps everything he once was, to reemerge as a ghost in a white sheet with two black cutouts for eyes. The classic pop culture depiction ⏤ Scooby Doo instantly comes to mind ⏤ is wondrous, innocent, and absurd. Lowery always pushes you right to the edge, just to see how far he can go, before slinking away again back into shadowy, psychological, and poetic depths. He intertwines his hand in ours, and we spend the remainder of the film following Affleck’s ghost, appearing damned to the property on which he lived.

Time’s vastness swallows you whole, and as you squirm inside its enormous belly of slop, you quickly learn that our story is no one else’s but our own. Yet we’re all kicking rocks along the exact same footpath of inconsequential decisions, artistic pursuits, love affairs, loneliness, and ultimately we’re just rotting maggots in the earth. There’s nothing left except cold dirt licking away what’s left of our bones. A Ghost Story ⏤ also probing life in bright, overexposed polaroids as new people fade in and out of Affleck’s former homestead ⏤ is a striking masterpiece.

I returned to my childhood home several years after my dad died. The house had been demolished, so far beyond repair, insides stripped of copper wire, glass shattered and pulverized into diamonds on torn, faded linoleum, and the property, once sprawling acreage of hilly countryside, totally flattened and unrecognizable. Only a brick chimney, the original structure, dangles and dazzles in the sunlight now. The brick chimney around which I would gather as a child, turning my frigid porcelain hands in its reds, yellows, and oranges in winter time, is a ghost, too. It’s an artifact of my father’s life; he was a blue-collar worker who worked two, three jobs at any given moment, often installing carpet and other flooring, while juggling the graveyard shift at the grocery store.

The film’s final frame, of Affleck’s ghost puffing into nothingness, the sheet tumbling to the floor, punctuates a film that perfectly, succinctly, astonishingly captures what it means to be a human being. As most human beings, I’ve lost a lot of people in my life: my grandparents are all gone, as are my friends Toni, Drew, Jose, Dylan, and Joe, and my uncle Bruce, my cousins Steven and Stephanie, and the list goes on and on. That list will inevitably grow with each passing year, and my own biological time clock ticks faster and faster, too, these days. I feel my life slipping away, that perhaps I am just a lab rat wriggling furry whiskers through endless, dead-end mazes. I can’t help it, but every moment flickers in my head like a homemade movie reel that just won’t shut the fuck off.

When I finished A Ghost Story last night, I immediately put on Phoebe Bridgers‘ A Stranger in the Alps. I needed ⏤ no, I wanted ⏤ to feel the existential dread, the rush coursing through my veins and tingling my fingertips. I wanted release from the emotions battering my rib cage like a bronco bull, but I also wanted to let them wash over and soothe my broken skin again. “I’m singing at a funeral tomorrow / For a kid a year older than me / And I’ve been talking to his dad; it makes me so sad / When I think too much about it I can’t breathe,” Bridgers’ feathered voice shape-shifts as a specter does. “Funeral” is angelic but unnerving.

It’s irresistible how she sings about death, the terrifying Grim Reaper collecting souls and discarding carcasses like its garbage day. Songs like “Killer” ⏤ in which she fantasizes her own death, an escape plunge out of a stagnant relationship ⏤ “Georgia,” and “You Missed My Heart” (a cover of Mark Kozelek and Jimmy LaValle, originally from their 2013 album, Perils from the Sea) take you hostage. And you’ll never see it coming.

A Ghost Story and Stranger in the Alps ⏤ which also sparks its hypnotic laser beams about living fiercely ⏤ could not be more perfectly matched, each an artistic achievement handling death with brutal honesty. It’s gruesome human nature that is most compelling. “I’m a can on a string, you’re on the end / We found our way out / Of the suicide pact of our family and friends / In the background, I’ll be waiting,” Bridgers sings with the call-and-response hook, a collaboration with Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst, on “Would You Rather.” Her pitch black intensity douses the nerve endings if you let it; from “Scott Street”s dense melancholy to the funeral march of “Smoke Signals” to “Chelsea,” a needling performance about Nancy Spungen’s murder at the hands of Sid Vicious.

Existential dread haunts me most days. The people who’ve died before me plague my misery-addled brain. I dream about them all. I dream about greeting my grandmother with kisses and hugs. I dream about arguing with my father about something or other. I dream about what I could have done differently. And I’m never OK. And I’m also tortured about what life means ⏤ and what’ll be left when my deathbed runs cold. That’s the human experience, I suppose. David Lowery’s A Ghost Story emphasizes the sheer enormity, and also the brevity, of life ⏤ it’s kind of unique, yeah? ⏤ and how we all barely keep it together. Time, as we know it in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years, is manmade, and it’s like a cartoon flip book. It’s here, and then it’s not here.

I dare you to watch A Ghost Story (it’s on Netflix) and immediately spin Stranger in the Alps ⏤ and tell me your body isn’t arrested with an existential crisis, too.

Follow B-Sides & Badlands on our socials: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram