Ghost Town Anthology

This a film that is demanding for the audience with a ghostly themed story about the inhabitants of a remote Canadian village who are coping with the suicide of a 20-year-old boy. The film is built on impressive (yet very modest and austere) images and depicts a fading community in a secluded frozen countryside. Although the community is considered cohesive and close-knit, the only thing holding it together in this depressing location (more a place for the dead than the living) are the last remnants of will. After the perception of time loses its meaning for the family of the bereaved, grieving over the tragic event, the town truly does begin to fill with ghosts and the film begins to work with a certain amount of tension, but there’s no need to expect a horror from this fragile and inconspicuous film about certain forms of fear and overcoming grief from loss - it is more of a simple thought concept, translated into a visual metaphorical form. (07/06/2019)

I submitted to the temptation of the horror elements. I’m a moron! This type of film is a plague of festivals. There’s no plot arc, it’s rather a simple thesis stretched to a weaker two hours, and it could be cut off at any time. There’s nothing more I can say about it. I was intensively uninterested in it already after ten minutes. #KVIFF2019 (07/02/2019)

A terribly interesting thesis about the depopulation of the countryside due to the more tangible presence of its unresolved history represented by its dead. And everything is incredibly slow. In the best moments, the film even stops altogether. However, the omnipresent winter, mournfulness, incompleteness, and sense of loss would surely have worked better if the exposition had relied more on objects, location, and space than the characters themselves, but how can you fault a film that concludes the entire hundred minutes of quiet desolation with credits underscored by The Body's industrial noisemakers. (11/07/2019)