Find Your Way Through Grief By Following the Ghostlight
Ghostlight opens with darkness smothering the rustle and whispers of an audience making its way to their seats before the show starts. Then: The rattling hiss of the stage curtain opening. We expect to see actors, a set, props. Instead, we just see a suburban backyard, the property of Dan (Keith Kupferer), who’s awake much too early for his or his wife’s liking, but helpless to do anything about his REM cycles apart from stare forlornly outside. Life, the film tells us up front, is a show we all perform in. But in the rest of the telling, Ghostlight argues that acting specifically, and the arts broadly, are necessary tools for understanding it.
If this sounds precious, then a visit to Alex Thompson’s last movie, Saint Frances, may be in order. That film, like Ghostlight, takes seriously its central subject matter while at the same time surrounding it with the kind of shaggy naturalist humor that crops up in our daily routines and public interactions – small-talk humor with strangers, time-killing humor with coworkers, deflective humor with our families. Ghostlight is a comedy in a loose sense, a tragedy in another, and a redemption song in yet one more. More succinctly, it’s a Thompson film, meaning it gently, tenderly unpacks and embodies every single feeling its characters might have about their situation at hand.
Like Saint Frances, Ghostlight was written by Kelly O’Sullivan, who played the lead in the former and goes behind the camera with Thompson to co-direct on this one. Dan is haunted by a year-old tragedy that goes unspecified for the film’s first hour; the choice to dole out pieces of that lingering incident, which weighs on Dan as surely as his wife, Sharon (Tara Mallen) and their daughter, Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), mimics the way Dan dances around his grief rather than face it. It’s a heartbreaking bread crumb trail, leading us bit by bit to the worst possible ordeal a family can endure. That injury is inflamed by an insult to Dan’s self-esteem: Mandatory leave from his construction job following a volcanic physical outburst on site.
Happily, misery loves company, and though Rita (Dolly de Leon), an erstwhile Broadway actress now doing community theater, isn’t miserable herself, exactly, she can pick a miserable soul out of a crowd like a hawk tracking mice through grass. She invites Dan to join her troupe for a production of Romeo and Juliet. Dan is blue collar, and Rita is an artist; Dan is a taciturn mountain on legs, Rita’s a surly woodland critter with an intolerance for nonsense. They’re a classic odd couple, and Ghostlight, as odd couple stories do, unspools surprising complementary traits in their differences.
De Leon’s screen presence dwarfs Kupferer’s, though he towers over her physically. The only time Dan reads as bigger in any meaningful sense pops up 50 minutes into the film, when Dan’s background becomes explicit. It’s a moment where every element that defines “cinema” synchronizes: Spartan writing leaves just enough space for Kupferer’s speech, soft-spoken bound by reticence, to breathe, while Thompson blocks the shot such that his lead is half in shadow, half in soft light, visible but obscured, a reflection of just how damn hard it is to open up about the angry gash across your spirit that’s stayed fresh for over a year.