Kesha's cameo
A Ghost Story is a 2017 film about a recently deceased, a ghost returns to his suburban home to console his bereft wife, only to find that in his spectral state, he has become unstuck in time, forced to watch passively as the life he knew and the woman he loves slowly slip away. The film stars Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, and Kesha. The film was directed by David Lowrey and was released July 21, 2017.
Plot[]
A musician lives with his wife in a small house in Dallas, Texas. They are shown being happy together, and are shopping for a new home and planning their move. She tells him the last thing she has ever done while moving out of a place is to hide a note for only herself in case she ever returns. They occasionally hear strange noises in the house and comment on them. One night, they hear a bang on their piano (which came with the house, and he wants to keep), but cannot find the cause.
The next morning, the husband is killed in a car accident in front of their house. At the hospital, his wife views his body and covers it with a sheet. The man awakens as a ghost covered in the sheet, and wanders through the hospital, invisible. A door of light opens before him, but he doesn't step towards it, and it closes. He walks home and watches his wife grieve over time. He spots another sheeted ghost inside the house next door; wordlessly, the ghost tells him that she is waiting for someone, but cannot remember who.
When the wife comes home with another man and kisses him, the ghost hurls books from the shelf and turns lights on and off. The wife later listens to a song written by her husband. She eventually decides to move out. Before she leaves, she writes a brief, possibly one-sentence note and hides it in a gap in a wall. The ghost picks at the gap but cannot retrieve the note.
A family moves in. The ghost watches them eat dinner, play the piano, and celebrate Christmas. He progressively becomes more agitated, while the children sense and are bothered by his presence. The family moves out after he hurls plates from the kitchen cabinet in anger. The second ghost continues to wait next door.
At a party thrown later by the next occupants, a partygoer delivers a philosophical monologue (the only lengthy spoken words in the film). The man says that remnants of the past, such as Beethoven's symphonies, will linger in the collective human memory long past the collapse of civilization. The man then describes the Big Crunch theory, which concludes that the entire universe will eventually collapse back into a single atom and begin anew. The partygoers notice the lights flicker.
The house eventually goes abandoned and derelict. Just as the ghost manages to slide the note out, bulldozers level the house along with the house next door. As they look at each other atop their houses' rubble, the second ghost says she no longer thinks "they're coming." The second ghost then immediately vanishes from under her sheet, which crumples to the ground.
The man's ghost watches as a skyscraper is built on the land. He is briefly shown walking through business settings before climbing to the roof, revealing a futuristic cityscape. The ghost jumps from the ledge and falls.
The scene then cuts to the ghost standing on empty land as a settler family is staking out the footprint of a home. He watches the family's young daughter, who is humming the song he wrote. She writes a note and hides it under a rock, akin to how his wife described doing as a child. The settler family are then shown dead after an attack, and the ghost watches as the daughter's corpse decays into the ground.
The scene cuts again to show the ghost back in the house, watching as his living self and his wife are seeing it for the first time, including the piano that has "always been here." As he watches over the couple, minor details are different from when he himself was alive, indicating that rather than moving backwards in time, he has moved forward, into a subsequent iteration of the universe. This time, the couple have discord, and the living husband is resisting the idea of moving out. The night before his death, his living self tells his wife that he is ready to move. The ghost sits at the piano and strikes the keys, causing the noise that startled them. Later as the wife moves out, the ghost sees his earlier self (now a ghost also, but unaware of the other's presence) watching her leave. He then goes to retrieve the note from the wall as before, and this time the note is close enough to the crack that he finally succeeds. Upon opening and reading the note, the ghost vanishes as his sheet crumples.