I apt into Ghostlight earlier on one afternoon in January at the Sundance Film Festival. In terms of the image, I had no information. It was playing when I thought it was much needed since it happened to be just the right length for me to stay off the streets for two hours. In fact, I did not even have an idea of which ski genre the picture belongs to. There was this one incredible idea that was my own, some nature documentary. It would soon discover itself to be epic wrong) Right now. About two hours and several rapid waves of uncontrollable sobs later, I came out of the theater still dazed and weakened as if I had just been in a dream. This is one of the nice things with film festivals: you get to see all the movies the way they were supposed to be seen, that is before people like me get to see them. While Ghostlight is still quite good to maintain itself, it would have been a better experience for everyone to watch it the way I did. To compare: Ghostlight is within the top three among the best films of the year and if that sounds enough to you then you are welcome to pause the reading at this point.
There are no major facets or surprises in the picture of Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, nor is the story in some way a form of an out of the box controversy. In fact, it is a gentle film that does not try too hard, effortlessly endearing itself to the viewers as it provides a tiny glimpse into strangers’ worlds. Perhaps, this is the reason that I am very cautious of ruining it by putting it under the light. Ghostlight chronicles one family, especially the father, Dan (Keith Kupfer), dusty unshaven heavy-set road crew with white collar tempers. His daughter Daisy (Katherine Millen Kupfer, the actor’s daughter in real life), has just been thrown out of school for pushing a senior teacher much too vigorously, which earlier had been recommended as a punishment for expulsion but her mother’s influence, Dan’s wife, Sharon, (Tara Millen, Keith’s wife and Katherine’s mother), who also works in the school taught by Dan also maintains the family.
One day, after yet another of Dan’s office meltdowns, a lady named Rita (Dolly De Leon) boldly invites him to a somewhat deserted retail space where she and her group of low budget actors are staging a no-budget, amateur production of Romeo and Juliet. Dan regards this meeting as quite impulsive, which suffices, still, in a way that is not hard to see why one might worry about Rita: her expectation is that an hour spent in their company and indulging in some exercises of imagination may be of some assistance to Dan who appears to be angry or irritated by something; on the other hand, Dan has nowhere better to be. But before long he is mesmerized by the laid back atmosphere of the set and the beautiful language written by Shakespeare, the man who, he confides, he does not even understand.
For most of the duration of the film, it remains suggestive at best as to why Dan and his family, for lack of a better word, are disturbed. It isn’t really a mystery, if that’s what you think it is it doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots but when one hears of the details of their tragedy, it is still like a punch in the face. O’Sullivan and Thompson play with something that would otherwise be considered a sort of narrative shortcut withholding from the audience pertinent information that most of the characters in the story already know. (Some of the more irritating movie cheesiness works in the same manner.) In Ghostlight, however, it works because the family itself is in denial. We start to get an idea of the full picture, the horrible picture, when they are finally interacting with their lawyer, squirming like bugs under a light. They, too, are buried in their own trauma which is perfectly rational since it is such a horrific ordeal.
It may be somewhat narratively convenient that the event in question looks suspiciously like the Shakespeare play being practiced, yet this is not its only purpose it is even more out of the box. That’s when the magic of the filmmaking kicks in. O’Sullivan and Thompson keep shooting Dan, and the almost mystical way he gets into this world. All of this seems unnatural; for all the dutiful banality of its depictions and its banal surroundings, Ghostlight peels in festive and epic fashion, from time to time. Or, more accurately, one of those moments when life suddenly feels different like draped in a more ethereal fantasy. The rhythms shift, as the affectionate relationships within the troupe differ dramatically from the monotonous legal jargon and tedious emotional transactions in the real world outside the theater. It ends up being a story of how story brings people together to create something greater than themselves that to create, love and forgive oneself and others are merely steps in the same human race.
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