If you lose a loved one on your journey through life, time slows down – just when you want for it to charge ahead and drive away all those festering memories. And if you’re the ghost of someone who died too young and you’re not ready to leave this world, now and then the clock might stop altogether, or even start going backwards. Four years after his highly original elegy Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, David Lowery brings us an equally absorbing film meditation on love and the essays of an ethereal household denizen who hovers across the centuries. The work’s exceptional method of articulating the spectre’s miserable quest to find eternal peace consists in its unexpectedly straightforward ideas, all the more elegantly interwoven in their linearity. New approaches to filmmaking and even creative courage are, in effect, often concealed within surprisingly simple contours. The most original movie screened at Sundance this year, A Ghost Story is headed up by Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara in a tale that effortlessly commands viewers’ senses and emotions like none other.