I gave this one about forty minutes.  Forty very unpleasant minutes.  “Viewers who go into Mother! expecting a traditional, psychologically plausible narrative will wind up feeling cheated, even trolled,” warned one review I read after the fact, and yeah, this movie is about a largely unrecognizable world full of people behaving in unrecognizable ways.  To expand a bit:

The world:  So, this is about a couple rebuilding their house after a fire.  And… the husband’s prized possession is some kind of crystal with magical glowy bits?  And the wife has visions of some kind of throbbing organic mass when she touches the wall?  And there’s some kind of disgusting creature or internal organ or whatever stuck in the toilet?  You really have to thread the needle to make surrealism tolerable to me and this was like jabbing that needle into my eye.

The people:  So a total stranger shows up at the door, and he gets to just stay the night?  And then his wife shows up?  And they presumptuously make themselves at home, starting with the guy lighting up a cigarette without permission (and then not taking the first hint about putting it out, and then littering with it), and in short order moving on to the two of them openly fucking in the living room?  Apparently it gets even worse after the forty minutes I watched, but the way the stranger’s wife tormented the young woman who actually lives at the house was enough to make me genuinely angry⁠—I was angry at her for being so awful, but more than that, I was angry at the movie for being about even the momentary toleration of these people’s intolerable behavior.  So I turned it off.  I figured I’d give it a one on my 24-point scale.  Maybe a two if I was feeling generous when I uploaded the November scores.

Then I looked up some reviews.  Here’s an excerpt from one.  “The reason Christ came was in order to absolve people of their sins.  Bardem’s poem is the salvation people are seeking.  It’s God giv­ing hope to his Israelites of the second coming.  There has to be a better way.  With the conception of Jesus, that new way became alive, the writer’s block lifted.  Enter the New Testament.  It’s all rather obvious to anyone who grew up in the church.”  Oh!  So on top of everything else, it’s one of those?  Okay, then that two is now a zero.

This was the film I was most looking forward to on this list, since the last movie to make it into my personal cinematic pantheon prior to The Florida Project was Summer Hours, also by Olivier Assayas.  Well, so much for that.  This is the third movie in a row that fits under the broad category of horror, which I generally do not like, and it’s not even semi-interesting horror like Get Out⁠—this is 19th-century horror with ghosts, mediums, and séances.  There is one 21st-century twist to it: these days most people spend all their time staring at their cell phones, and the main character spends most of the movie staring at her cell phone.  She gets texts from an unknown number and thinks they might be from a ghost.  “R u alive or dead ?” she frantically taps out with her thumbs.  Swipe left on this one, folks.  (That’s the bad one, right?)  I just hope that the next one isn’t a ghost story.

Oh, for cryin’ out loud.

Well, at least this one is more interesting than the last one.  Personal Shopper was altogether too serious about its ghosts.  The ghosts in A Ghost Story are the “kindergartener on Hallow­een” kind: literally people in gigantic bedsheets with two big eyeholes.  This is not for comedic purposes⁠—okay, it’s a little comedic⁠—but rather to signify that we are looking at a Symbol.  Yes, like those in Personal Shopper, these ghosts scare folks by dropping and breaking objects, making lights flicker, and so forth, but the bedsheet signals that we’re not supposed to be thinking about the haunting as literal.  And yes, every ghost story is on some level about the grieving process and the difficulty of grappling with the finality of death and whatnot, but the bed­sheet signals that in this case the surface level is not really im­portant at all.  This film is only about⁠—well, wait, no.  Yes, it is about the grieving process and the difficulty of grappling with the finality of death and whatnot.  But mainly it is about itself.  The movie repeatedly calls attention to its own movie-ness, starting with its old-timey aspect ratio and rounded corners, but particularly with the way it handles the passage of time.  Lowery seems intent on demonstrating as many different ways as he can think of to indicate that we’re leaping ahead in time by a season or a year or a decade⁠—or, on the contrary, to indicate that time is passing excruciatingly slowly.  There is a scene that is just five and a half uninterrupted minutes of a woman eating a pie.  It reminded me of another film with Casey Affleck in it, Gerry, which was mainly just a series of 5½-minute shots of two guys walking.  I guess it stands to reason that the voters who ranked Gerry #4 in 2003 would rank this #4 in 2017.

Anyway, Pattern 34 says that this movie should have done no­thing for me: “The specifically cinematic aspects of film form don’t particularly interest me. Any movie whose chief raison d’être is to explore how to convey something with a camera is pretty unlikely to be my thing.”  The chief raison d’être of A Ghost Story is to explore how to convey something with a cam­era.  But I liked it more than I disliked it⁠—I mean, I gotta admit, the way it conveyed things with a camera actually was pretty interesting!  (Though maybe not the part with the pie.)

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