He had just finished a Disney movie. Dragons, effects, a budget in the tens of millions. Then he disappeared for nineteen days and shot a movie in secret.

It cost about a hundred thousand dollars, it was nearly wordless, and its main character was a man under a white bedsheet with two eyeholes cut in it.

David Lowery's A GHOST STORY (2017) should have been ridiculous. A grown man in a makeshift Halloween costume drifting through a house is a joke, until it becomes one of the loneliest images you have ever seen.

The man, played by Casey Affleck, cannot leave the property. So he stays, years running past, holding on as the remnants of his life fall away.

Rooney Mara plays the widow, and in one unbroken shot that stops the movie dead, she sits on the floor and eats an entire pie. The scene feels both interminable and true.