Read Only the First Paragraph of This Ghostlight Review

Keith Kupferer and Tara Mallen in Ghostlight. Photo: Luke Dyra/IFC Films

I wandered into Ghostlight early one afternoon this past January at the Sundance Film Festival. I didn’t know anything about the picture; it was simply playing at the right time and was just the right length to keep me off the street for a couple of hours. I didn’t even know what genre it belonged to. (For some reason, I had a vague thought that it might be a nature documentary. This turned out to be hilariously incorrect.) Two hours and a few waves of uncontrollable tears later, I walked out of the theater in a wondrous daze. This is one of the great things about film festivals: You can experience movies as a blank slate, before people like me get to them. Ghostlight is strong enough to stand on its own, but I wish everyone could experience it as I did. Or, to put it another way: Ghostlight is one of the best movies of the year, and if that’s a meaningful enough statement for you, then feel free to stop reading now.

It’s not that Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s picture is filled with twists or surprises or anything like that, nor does its story represent some kind of left-field provocation. If anything, it’s a modest film, one that works its charms softly as it quietly opens a little door into other people’s lives. Maybe that’s why I’m wary of ruining it by holding it up too closely to the light. Ghostlight follows one family, and in particular the father, Dan (Keith Kupferer), a burly, easily distracted road-crew worker with a hot temper. His emotionally troubled daughter, Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer, the actor’s actual offspring), has just been suspended from school for aggressively pushing a teacher, a punishment reduced from expulsion thanks to the pleadings of Dan’s wife, Sharon (Tara Mallen — Keith’s real wife and Katherine’s real mom), who also teaches at the same school and is struggling to keep the family together and sane.

One day, after another one of Dan’s own blowups at work, a curious woman, Rita (Dolly De Leon), beckons him into the semi-abandoned storefront where she and a ragtag group of actors are busy rehearsing a no-budget, amateur production of Romeo and Juliet. It’s an impulsive decision for both of them: Rita thinks that an hour in their presence, doing imagination exercises, might help him get away from whatever’s troubling him; Dan, for his part, has nothing better to do. But he’s soon drawn to the easy camaraderie of this makeshift theater troupe and the elegant power of Shakespeare’s prose, even though he admits he doesn’t understand any of it.

For much of its running time, the film only hints at what’s actually troubling Dan and his family. It’s not a secret, exactly — the clues are pretty easy to put together — but the revelation of their tragedy still hurts like a kick to the teeth. O’Sullivan and Thompson flirt with something that ordinarily would feel like a narrative cheat: hiding from the audience an important piece of backstory that is otherwise known by most of the characters in the story. (Some of the more annoying movie twists work in this fashion.) In Ghostlight, however, it feels emotionally true, because the family itself refuses to acknowledge what’s happened. It’s not until they’re finally meeting with their attorney, wriggling like insects pinned to a wall, when we start to get the full, brutal picture. They, too, are dancing around their trauma — understandably so, because it’s too awful to bear.

That the event in question bears more than a passing resemblance to the Shakespeare play being rehearsed might seem a bit too narratively convenient. But it’s actually more than that — it’s fantastical. That’s where the filmmaking comes in. O’Sullivan and Thompson keep their cameras fixed on Dan, and on the almost magical way he’s pulled into this world. There’s something unreal about all this; for all the muted realism of its performances and its everyday milieu, Ghostlight plays at times like a kind of spectral fantasy. Or, more accurately, like one of those experiences when real life briefly feels like it’s edged into a spectral fantasy. Its rhythms shift, as the warm interactions of the troupe contrast sharply with the drab legalese and agonizing emotional accounting required in the world beyond the theater’s walls. In the end, it becomes a film about the world-changing power of artistic communion, about how creativity, compassion, and forgiveness — of oneself and others — are all pit stops on the same human journey.