I start talking about A Ghost Story seriously like a couple pages in. Be patient.

On the films that I put in a category that, for lack of a better name, I simply call “different.”

I am deeply in love with film. I mean seriously in love with the entire medium. I watch everything I can get my hands on out of the insatiable desire to consume and experience everything and anything I possibly can during my short stint on this planet.

I recently saw the movie A Ghost Story, and to put it bluntly and undersell it completely, it blew me the fuck away. Honestly, that really doesn’t capture it. It was a truly epiphanic experience. The kind of film where after it’s finished you sit through the credits in a fugue like non-existence before finally piecing your atomized brain particles back together in as close to a functioning semblance as possible, just long enough so you can make it home. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly how I wanted to write about this film (because I absolutely need to write about it), and I realized that this is a perfect opportunity to discuss a particular neurosis regarding the way I view and categorize the films I’ve seen.

While satisfying my voracious appetite for Film as a medium, I’ve come to categorize the myriad array of movies I’ve seen into two esoteric categories in my head, and I’ve named these categories – by employing the full capacities of my outstanding creative – as “regular” films and “different” films. Original, I know. This category is particularly interesting because, in my head at least, it exists separate from hypothetical numerical scores I would give individual films (A practice that I used to obsess over but now believe should be burned from all human habits).

This entirely arbitrary method of film categorization in my head has absolutely no definable characteristics to it – film scholars would most likely attribute what I’m about to describe to auteur theory (I disagree with the notion that this theory has any relevance) – and it instead functions on a sort of, “you know it when you see it,” logic.

The functioning logic, at least as far as I can identify it, for this list is essentially a sensual experience from these films that is notably different from other movies I’ve seen. I can watch a movie and appreciate the acting, the directing, the cinematography, the score, the editing, the set design, every individual detail that went into its creation – and I mean truly and wholly relish in the experience – and yet that film is possibly not one of these “different” films. They have the surreal and uncanny quality of the adage, “more than the sum of its parts,” being somehow manifested into a physical form on Earth. They’re transformative films that touch your soul and grip deep into your subconscious – digging their roots into the soil of your mind – and they never leave it.

The films range from the oeuvre of directors like David Lynch and Hayao Miyazaki to singular works like Blade Runner or La Haine. A fair number of them aren’t even the best examples of perfect film execution or technical prowess, such as The Truman Show or Let the Right One In. There is really no relevant pattern in the genre of the films selected, not a certain region of the world over another, not even a predominant pattern of actors. Really, if I must be honest with myself, the sheer lack of coherence between certain individual films that I have arbitrarily decided fit in this category is probably a warning flag of some mental deficiency on my part.

To wit, I have identified 50 films that most certainly belong in this category, with another 20 or so floating on the fringes, and another roughly 100 or more that could possibly belong if I took the time to revisit each of them to check. The best cases for pointing out this absurd minutia of difference between “regular” films and “different” ones happen to be the works of David Lynch.

Anyone who has seen a David Lynch film will most likely, at some point in their discussion of the film, resort to describing the film as simply, “an experience.” This will immediately strike the person subjected to this kind of explanation of a film as inane, unhelpful, and all around non-productive because of the way it just sort of shuts off the conversation about the film. And I don’t mean that you can’t talk about the film, you most certainly can (and should), it just kind of shines a light on the nature of human perception and experience in a way that we like to sort of not acknowledge. You start using other vague expletives to try and convey what the movie meant to you, and you just slide into the realization that Lynch’s films sort of escape concise explanation in language. You can bullet point the plot, explain the scenes, take about the editing or the sound design, but really all you’re doing is talking about what exists, and not how it works. It doesn’t’ get into the nitty-gritty of your sensual experience because it’s frankly impossible to translate that into a straight up

The films escape description. They are more than the sum of their parts, and they are better for it. And it just so happens that A Ghost Story is one of those films.

Where I finally talk about A Ghost Story:

So, I finally had the opportunity the other week to see this little film I’ve heard about all year long – since all the way back at the start of the year – and after months of waiting and excruciating weeks watching it release at seemingly every theater in the country except my own, my opportunity came. I went in blind figuring I was in for an artsy little indie movie about a ghost haunting a house after he dies. It turned out to be a monolithic piece of beautiful, life affirming, art – the kind of movie I will be thinking about and telling people about, for months and years to come. If you have not seen this movie, I absolutely urge you to STOP READING THIS NOW and go see it. It will change your life. I am not kidding. Go. Now.

So, you saw what I saw, right? Holy shit…

Okay, so, this movie is just straight up brilliant. It’s genius. It’s a show of such incredible technical prowess. It’s an example of perfect storytelling. It’s transcendent. It’s universal but also oh so achingly personal. It’s heartbreaking, devastating, soul-cleansing, and profound to such a degree that a still of the ghost in this film might as well be substituted into the dictionary in place of the old definition of the word. This movie is straight-up life changing. I’m not going to describe the movie, I’m not going to summarize it, I can’t. I truly, honestly can’t. I would fall into the trap I described earlier – I’d just be saying things that happened without conveying what they mean. So, instead, since I should talk about it in some way, I’m going to talk about the moment in the film where I started to hold my breath and didn’t breathe out again until the end. No, I’m not talking about the skyscraper scene. I’m also not talking about the scene right after that. I’m not referring to the brief tease at the possibility of a buddy movie featuring two ghosts, nor am I referring to the extended Rosetta Stone -esque conversation in the middle of the film. The part I’m talking about is just after we see Affleck as a ghost for the first time. It’s the first time you see the film do the “thing.”

Affleck is walking, as a ghost (naturally), and he does this quick little turn, and as he turns, the editing in the movie is so perfectly synced with the flow of motion within the frame that it seamlessly transitions. I didn’t even realize there was a cut (I honestly didn’t). And then the film tips its hand. We realize that in that nigh impossible to notice cut, and undetermined amount of time has passed. In the blink of an eye, without us noticing, it’s gone. Time has slipped away, and we can’t even tell exactly how much. We never get a true answer. I gasped out loud in the theater (thankfully there were only two other people present, both fairly far away from me). This simple little trick – a trick the movie puts to expert use – is the crux of everything. This small sleight of hand is the structure on which the entire profundity of the experience rides. David Lowry never flubs it. Every cut is more and more powerful. The longer a scene draws on, the tenser it becomes. You know what is coming, you dread what is coming, and yet, you are utterly and completely powerless to stop it. Lowry makes you scared of cuts. You don’t want to take your eyes off the experience because in the blink of an eye entire lives can rise and fall.

And that’s kind of the whole point. Far be it from me to assign meaning to a film like this, but to my mind, this is the “what” of the films’ meaning. A Ghost Story makes it so are pants-pissingly terrified of blinking, yawning, getting distracted, or, God forbid, checking your phone for fear that in that brief moment between seconds, moments that drag on infinitely, life might just slip by. You might miss it. And you know what? That’s beautiful.