Near the middle of David Lowery’s singular film, A Ghost Story, a man is at a party talking about the end of everything. “A songwriter writes a song. A novelist writes a novel. A symphonist writes a symphony. We do what we can to endure.” When faced with the enormity of time and the certainty of its complete destruction, we have to accept that what we create ultimately won’t endure. So, why do we make art? For Lowery [Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Pete’s Dragon?!] though, this certainly isn’t meant as an existential cry of nihilism – otherwise, why would he have made A Ghost Story?

Few films have ever tried to tackle a question of this magnitude, nor have they done so through such a small lens. This is, in terms of location, a tiny film and it is a short one too, running at just under an hour and a half. To emphasise this minimalism, here is what happens in A Ghost Story. The protagonist (Oscar-winner Casey Affleck), unnamed, but known in the credits as C, lives with M (Rooney Mara), his girlfriend. C is killed in a car accident and returns as a ghost in a white sheet. M deals with her grief and then leaves, whilst C stays in the house. That is what, on the surface, happens. Lowery does keep some surprises in his back pocket. Though they don’t change anything, they do help you unpack this complex film.

In spite of the enormity of this film’s ideological scope and its short run time, it is a slow one as well. Nothing comes fast and nothing comes easy. But in an age where instantaneous gratification is all but demanded by consumers of entertainment, these pauses and slowly unfolding scenes feel meditative and purposeful. And they really do feel so long, adding to that sense of how enormous time truly is and can be. Somehow, in an hour and a half, you feel like you’ve experienced all of time and existence alongside Casey Affleck’s white-sheeted ghost. This is why this film will annoy so many people. It will feel self-indulgently slow.

There isn’t even much dialogue to carry us through these intimate moments. The speech that comes halfway through about the certainty of our destruction in the universe is possibly half of all the dialogue spoken in the film. Nor do you get to feed off the actors’ expressions as Casey Affleck is under a white sheet for most of the film and Rooney Mara, magnificent nevertheless, is not in the film much at all – though she too, in a way, lingers like a ghost (even if she doesn’t hang around in a white sheet).

Most of what is so affecting about A Ghost Story is Lowery’s control over the cinematic medium. It is, also, a beautiful film. Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo shoots this film in an almost square, 1.37:1 aspect ratio (perhaps a throwback to the silent film era) and fills each frame with natural light and deliberate, and slow, but considered moves. There is an intense control in each frame. One particular scene of visual potency comes near the beginning of the film where Affleck, before his death and the car accident, is writing music on his computer and Mara is asking him about moving a piano. He engulfs the screen and she is blurred in the background. It’s not an original shot, but knowing when to employ the right shot in the right way and having the viewer never notice is something only the greatest cinematographers strive for.

Few directors could have even attempted this film. Only a handful of names come to mind: Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, and Terrence Malick. Lowery, however, does not deserve comparison. With this film, he is an equal of the masters. But when we think of these names, we think of how long it has taken for some of them, and their work, to be understood. Perhaps, fifty years from now, film students will put on A Ghost Story and discuss it, and David Lowery, in the same breath as we so feverishly regard his predecessors today. Then again, maybe not. As it is for Affleck’s white-sheeted ghost, so it shall be with A Ghost Story; only time may tell.

Lochley Shaddock is a novelist, essayist, film critic and screenwriter/director

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