When we think of ghosts, we imagine dark creatures in the night, there to taunt and haunt us. Yet Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers offers up another vision of them — of loved ones returning from the dead. When screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott) revisits his childhood home in the Paul Mescal-starring film, he finds his late parents ushering him through the door as though they’d never died. They’re not surprised to see him, instead catching up on the lost years with curiosity. The film excels with Andrew’s brilliant performance of a return to his inner child; a sensitive soul with deep-seated pain and grief that went unresolved. Here, loss returns in strange forms — full of anguish, but also replete with the love that remained.
As we watch our protagonist speak to his parents, we see the complexity of loss: Adam comes out to them and has to deal with their flaws and the terse conversation it precipitates. We see time as disjointed — his parents still treating him the same, despite Adam now being older than they were when they died. It’s a realisation that grief leaves so many things unsaid; that we ache not only for the past but for the future, for the things that go unresolved.
Based on Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, Andrew Haigh’s alternate exploration of grief owes its origin to Asian literature and cinema, which is populated with this more thoughtful kind of ghost story. Here, ghosts reveal that we are not simply ‘done’ with grief; that in it, we also see the complications of unending love.
If you can’t wait until the release of All of Us Strangers on 26 January 2024, get in the mood now by working your way through these seven movies depicting unconventional ghost stories.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives (2010)
Winner of the 2010 Palme D’Or, the Apichatpong Weerasethakul-directed Uncle Boonmee is an exploratory and reflective film set in a peaceful mountain valley, where ghosts and mythical creatures sometimes visit their loved ones. Uncle Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar), who has spent his life as a farmer in the village, is now dying of kidney disease. We see him go about his everyday business, tying up affairs while preparing to say goodbye. One night, as he’s having dinner with his sister-in-law, he’s joined by his late wife (now translucent) and son (embodying a gorilla with red eyes). We observe their conversations on life, death and lingering regrets with a muted tenderness that avoids any false sentimentality. In fact, some of the most moving sequences occur outside of the human realm, with long shots roaming lush green forests. The film’s expansive sense of time stretches beyond the finality of human timelines, corresponding to Buddhist beliefs that nature and all living things are renewable across many forms.
What Time is it There? (2001)
Tsai Ming-Liang’s films have always been concerned with love, death and memory — and as a consequence, ghosts. His most famous film Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) is a ghostly love letter to cinema, but What Time Is It There? is similarly preoccupied with temporal disjunctions that upend our present lives in a time of loss. At the start of the film, we see our protagonist Hsiao Kang (Lee Kang-sheng) hold a funerary urn containing his father’s ashes. When his car passes through a tunnel, he whispers to his father’s spirit, asking him to fly above the vehicle to re-join them on the other side. His father will soon be reincarnated as mice, fish, walls and maybe even a clock, his mother (Lu Yi-ching) proclaims. Attempting to invite his spirit into their home, Hsiao’s mother becomes increasingly superstitious, covering their windows, changing the clocks to live by “your father’s time”, and even invoking the spirit to return for an erotic encounter. As Hsiao becomes more irritated by his mother’s rituals, he too spirals into his own obsession: after he sells his watch to a young woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) who’s moving to Paris, he cannot get her off of his mind — yearning after her and consequently changing all the clocks he sees in Taipei to Paris time. As we watch three different time-zones overlap — Paris, Taipei and spectral time — we see the moving attempt of trying to steal time back for our loved ones. Tsai Ming-Liang doesn’t shy away from the illogical or the absurd, but looks at the strife of lonely souls out of sync.
Journey to the Shore (2015)
The gentle and subtle movements of this ghost story are not something you would usually expect to find in a Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s feature — the director is best known for his J-horrors — but the effect is a subtle, elegiac exploration of the afterlife. The film treats life and death with the same mundanity: Mizuki’s dead husband Yusuke returns after three years and she’s not shocked, just annoyed that he’s wearing shoes in the house. As Yusuke takes Mizuki on a journey to visit the people who helped him return to her, we see a physical journey transform into a spiritual one. The rhythm of the film is languid, with an almost dreamlike quality that allows difficult conversations to flow into moments of silence; heavy themes without the painful sentimentality. Instead, Kurosawa focuses on the fragile comforts of being in the same space as your dead lover.
Our House (2017)
A student of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Yui Kiyohara is a female director to watch out for. This year, her affecting film Remembering Every Night (2022) premiered at the Berlinale to great acclaim; her debut film, Our House, was similarly imaginative — a ghost story without any ghosts. Following two storylines with two pairs of women who live in the same house, in parallel universes in a Tokyo suburb, the film explores two lines of overlapping existence and diverging lives that occasionally intersect. First, we meet Seri, a 14-year-old girl mourning her father’s death and struggling to accept her widowed mother’s new boyfriend. On the other side, there’s Toko, a woman in her twenties who invites Sana, a woman experiencing amnesia, to live with her. The two worlds occasionally graze each other as mysterious events begin to occur — when Seri drops a newspaper on the floor, Sana picks it up in the next scene; Sana hides a gift for Toko, only for it to be found by Seri. Kiyohara’s formal precision emphasises the parallel lives through many identically framed shots.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018)
An esoteric and non-linear film that confused both audiences and critics alike upon its premiere, Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a paean to daring and indefinable filmmaking. We follow Luo Hongwu, a man who returns to his hometown in Kaili after his father dies, where he attempts to re-trace his memories of his youth. Once there, he is haunted instead by the memory, or the ghost, of his friend Wildcat who died down a mine. The film continues with him attempting to trace down Qiwen, an enigmatic woman who he had an affair with 20 years previously, whose presence he now feels in every woman he meets. Blurring the line between memory and reality, these unlinked and non-chronological sequences take on the logic of dreaming. Half-way through, Luo enters a cinema and dons a pair of 3D glasses, inviting the viewer to do the same. From them on, we follow a single travelling shot that, when watched in 3D, is a ghostly, out-of-body experience — pulling the viewer into the scene as the camera moves freely through the air, along the ground and up mountains. With the ripe, vivid colours and the meandering memory sequences, the film is a trippy hallucination steeped in sensuality.
Mekong Hotel (2012)
Another Apitchatpong Weerasethakul film, this hour-long feature is more experimental in form. It drifts between documentary realism and the supernatural, following a series of slow conversations before his characters suddenly devolve into cannibal phi pho ghosts from Thai folklore. It’s a surprisingly mellow film that centres on a flesh-eating ghost who speaks about spirits, the nature of incarnation and even of the failings of the government during the 2011 floods of the Mekong River. The eerie scenes of ghosts gripped by hunger alludes to the government’s bottomless greed and corruption. In an interview, the director called the river “symbolically important”. He continues, “It’s a place where my father’s ashes are scattered”. Mekong Hotel is an expansive folkloric tableau on loss and the spirit world.
Ugetsu (1953)
Ugetsu is often described as one of the most masterful works of Japanese cinema. Set in 16th century Japan, the film focuses on the lives of two couples: the poor potter Genjuro and his wife Miyagi; and Tobei, a peasant with dreams of becoming a samurai, and his wife Ohama, who ridicules his fantasies. As the men attempt to achieve their goals, they wreak havoc on their lives and wives, with the film soon venturing into ghostly supernatural territory. The ethereal cinematography of Kazuo Miyagawa creates an unsettling world of fog and shadow. A cult classic.
For more films on ghosts and grief, head to London’s Barbican in January 2024 for their ‘Visions from the Wake’ season, exploring alternative representations of grief in diasporic cinema.