One of the problems with transforming movie trailers into an anticipation game is that it’s too easy to focus on trailers for movies we’re already excited about. Sure, it’s fun to see a new preview for another Star Wars movie or for Spider-Man: Homecoming, but it’s not like you don’t already know about those movies. It’s not as though awareness desperately needed to be raised.
That’s why it’s far more important to celebrate trailers that surprise us, and make us excited for a film that otherwise flew under the radar, than it is to endlessly gab about trailers for blockbusters that most of us were automatically going to see anyway. And that’s why today, in particular, it’s far more important that you see the preview for David Lowery’s A Ghost Story than it is to see the one for Spider-Man: Homecoming (although, quite obviously, you’re more than welcome to watch and enjoy both).
A Ghost Story stars Casey Affleck as a man who dies and haunts the house where he lived with his wife, played by Rooney Mara. His hauntings seem to involve no visual effects whatsoever. He spends what could be eternity in a long white sheet with two holes cut into it, like a child’s Halloween costume. And it appears, in this new preview, that he’s going to linger at that house long, long, long after his wife leaves it.
It’s a haunting preview, in more ways than one, and it’s an exciting promise for a film which – we hope – delivers on its heavy, sad notions of death, memory and our individual impacts on history. It made a big impression on me and I think it might have a similar impression on you. So in between your tweets about what you think about Spider-Man, take a couple minutes to appreciate an artistically ambitious and fascinating new preview for A Ghost Story.
Hopefully, when the film comes out on July 7, 2017 (the same day as Spider-Man: Homecoming), it will live up to this. But since it comes from David Lowery, the director of the magical and surprising Pete’s Dragon, and since it’s getting a lot of buzz out of Sundance, there’s at least a very good chance that it will.
Top Photo: A24
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon, and watch him on the weekly YouTube series What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
