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When Will Oldham's character launches into his monologue, he's probably not exactly sure where he'll be going with it, but a hunch in his gut guides him to a desolate conclusion. Lowery's story rolls out as if he were thinking out loud, and though it also eventually wanders out to the very infinitude of the universe, he ends up in far less desperate straits.

A Ghost Story is not so much the wisdom of a life lived as it is dinner party conversation for intellects of a certain age. But it is also a work of cinematic imagination from an up-and-comer who wants to build on the very Malick-isms that have turned so many moviegoers off. The middle passage, where time slips between cuts and pans, is beautifully detailed.

More idiosyncratic but inertly contrived is A Ghost Story, David Lowery's take on how space is inhabited by the past. While it found many ardent fans, it never transcends quirk for anything more profound in its fashioning of an afterlife of lonely, sheet-wearing ghosts, as much as its inventive visual jokes charm.

What is intriguing about this ghost story is not the fact that Lowery decides to tell it from the point of view of the ghost rather than the haunted humans. It's the distance that Lowery places between Affleck's character as a human – he plays C, the musician husband of Mara's M – and the mournful, wafting presence he becomes after death. Once everything that made him human – his physical being, his powers of communication – is whittled away, what remains is love and an aching longing.

The sheet garb was by all accounts difficult to film, which makes sense when you think about it – this teetering on the verge of absurdity. Yet absurdity is avoided. The sudden movements of the ghost as it turns its head, the fabric folds immaculately lit and not quite falling in a naturalistic fashion, are very suggestive. The film takes a huge risk with this central image, but makes it work on every level – effortlessly, gracefully, creating a lyrical exploration of emotional fade and loss.

It's always refreshing to see filmmakers trying new things or taking a different direction, as is the case with David Lowery and his odd, adorable and devastating latest. Long takes and a boxy aspect ratio replace the more standard Hollywood style of his most recent work, Ain't Them Bodies Saints and Pete's Dragon, to tell the story of time. Here, Lowery explains how he planned and shot a key scene in A Ghost Story, which encapsulates the whole film with delicate and gripping immediacy.

For Lowery, there's no reincarnation, no circle of life, only a process of disengagement. One might be tempted to call his ghost patient, but that would suggest a linear narrative at work. Instead, Lowery's obliteration of time renders C naive. He is a spectator—just as we are. A Ghost Story may be thinly plotted, but it's thick with introspection, dodging any easy interpretation. It may well be all about time, but as C learns, time isn't as useful as we might have thought.

The speed with which these later passages unfold make one miss the slowness of the earlier scenes, when characters made more significant impressions. But that seems to be the point. Lowery wants to imagine how it would feel to lose one's identity and, with it, one's connection to time and space. What a depressing hell that must be, and what an aching film A Ghost Story is.

Lowery can't always keep the movie from drifting through the mists of pretension, and the tremulous, too-precious score, by Daniel Hart, is sometimes intrusive. Still, the picture's visual imagery--the cinematographer is Andrew Droz Palermo--is so restlessly poetic that it's hard to turn away. Like a wild, sonorous piano chord struck by someone or something in the middle of the night--where did that come from?--the contemplative aura of A Ghost Story sticks with you.

A quietly grand romantic mystery, a metaphysical vision of love that is inseparable from Lowery's wildly inventive yet controlled way with the very stuff of movies: movement, performance, space, time, light, color, reflections, effects, talk, sound, and, for that matter, silence. The film, which pulls an epigram from Virginia Woolf's story "A Haunted House," is a jewel-like novella written directly onto the screen in images.

Time keeps on slipping into the future in A Ghost Story. It's a movie that seems to move simultaneously in slow motion and hyperspeed. Individual scenes are inflated with dead air and drag to the point of inertia, but the whole thing flies by with the serene velocity of great short fiction, like a novella that you read in a single sitting because it would seem like a betrayal of the author's talent and trust to break your concentration.

A wondrous, delicate shell of a movie that writer/director David Lowery made quietly and on the cheap after finishing Pete's Dragon for Disney. Its drollness is part of the miraculous balancing act it pulls off in transmitting its huge themes through humble imagery, from the ramshackle rental in which it mostly takes place to the scene in which M tries to numb her grief by eating pie until she's sick. It's a wide-reaching film told in miniature.