A Ghost Story (2017)
Directed by David Lowery
No — A Ghost Story is not woke, scoring 6 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
David Lowery's A Ghost Story follows a bedsheeted Casey Affleck through grief, time, and the slow demolition of a Texas house, and it does so with an austerity that leaves very little room for the cultural signifiers we are here to tabulate.
Consciousness Markers
The party scene delivers an explicit monologue on the meaninglessness of existence and the eventual heat-death of the universe, a rare moment of didacticism in an otherwise wordless, contemplative film.
The cast is predominantly white, with a Spanish-speaking family and a few Black actors appearing in minor, unremarked roles. Diversity exists naturally in the margins but is never foregrounded as a statement.
Rooney Mara's 'M' is a central grieving figure with interiority, but the film is an existential mood piece rather than a work advancing a feminist thesis.
A Spanish-speaking family and a 19th-century settler family killed by Native Americans appear, but these are narrative set-dressing rather than vehicles for racial commentary.
The nihilistic party speech about the futility of all creative pursuits carries a faint whiff of meaninglessness, but it targets existence itself, not economic systems.
The party monologue gestures at cosmic entropy and the end of the universe, but this is existential dread, not an environmentalist crusade.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in the film's meditation on grief and time.
The infamous pie-eating scene is a study in grief and self-destruction, not a celebration of body acceptance.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are present.
The 19th-century flashback employs a conventional Western trope of a Native American attack without reinterpreting or revising the historical narrative.
Why it received this score
David Lowery's A Ghost Story follows a bedsheeted Casey Affleck through grief, time, and the slow demolition of a Texas house, and it does so with an austerity that leaves very little room for the cultural signifiers we are here to tabulate. The cast is overwhelmingly white; a Spanish-speaking single mother and her children drift through the middle act, and a handful of Black performers appear in unremarked bit parts. Their presence is natural and unstressed, which is to say it makes no argument. Rooney Mara's M grieves with real interiority, though the film has no thesis to advance on her behalf beyond the fact that loss is lonely. No queer characters surface. No neurodivergent ones either. This is a film about a man under a sheet, and the sheet is doing most of the talking.
The one moment of outright sermonizing arrives at a party, where a guest announces that all creative endeavor is pointless because the universe will eventually die. It is a lecture on entropy and futility, delivered deadpan. Environmental anxiety hums faintly beneath it, and a nihilistic contempt for ambition might be mistaken for economic critique, but the target is existence itself, not any system. The 19th-century interlude, in which a settler family is killed by Native Americans, treats the trope as period furniture. Nothing is revised.
The infamous pie sequence, in which M eats until she vomits, has been recruited in some quarters as a statement about appetite and the body. It is nothing of the kind. It is a portrait of self-destruction, and the camera regards it with the same flat patience it applies to everything else. We are left with a beautiful, somber mood piece with almost no interest in the social questions of its moment. It wants to make you feel small before the cosmos. It succeeds.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Recently deceased, a white-sheeted 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.
Questions about A Ghost Story
Is A Ghost Story woke?
No — A Ghost Story is not woke, scoring 6 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does A Ghost Story have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Lecture Energy at 20.
How does A Ghost Story compare to other 2017 movies?
It ranks #224 of the 309 films from 2017 we've scored; their average is 19. The wokest is I Am Not Your Negro (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.