Ghostlight opens with darkness smothering the rustle and whispers of an audience making its way to their seats before the show starts. Then: The rattling hiss of the stage curtain opening. We expect to see actors, a set, props. Instead, we just see a suburban backyard, the property of Dan (Keith Kupferer), who’s awake much too early for his or his wife’s liking, but helpless to do anything about his REM cycles apart from stare forlornly outside. Life, the film tells us up front, is a show we all perform in. But in the rest of the telling, Ghostlight argues that acting specifically, and the arts broadly, are necessary tools for understanding it.
If this sounds precious, then a visit to Alex Thompson’s last movie, Saint Frances, may be in order. That film, like Ghostlight, takes seriously its central subject matter while at the same time surrounding it with the kind of shaggy naturalist humor that crops up in our daily routines and public interactions – small-talk humor with strangers, time-killing humor with coworkers, deflective humor with our families. Ghostlight is a comedy in a loose sense, a tragedy in another, and a redemption song in yet one more. More succinctly, it’s a Thompson film, meaning it gently, tenderly unpacks and embodies every single feeling its characters might have about their situation at hand.
Like Saint Frances, Ghostlight was written by Kelly O’Sullivan, who played the lead in the former and goes behind the camera with Thompson to co-direct on this one. Dan is haunted by a year-old tragedy that goes unspecified for the film’s first hour; the choice to dole out pieces of that lingering incident, which weighs on Dan as surely as his wife, Sharon (Tara Mallen) and their daughter, Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), mimics the way Dan dances around his grief rather than face it. It’s a heartbreaking bread crumb trail, leading us bit by bit to the worst possible ordeal a family can endure. That injury is inflamed by an insult to Dan’s self-esteem: Mandatory leave from his construction job following a volcanic physical outburst on site.
Happily, misery loves company, and though Rita (Dolly de Leon), an erstwhile Broadway actress now doing community theater, isn’t miserable herself, exactly, she can pick a miserable soul out of a crowd like a hawk tracking mice through grass. She invites Dan to join her troupe for a production of Romeo and Juliet. Dan is blue collar, and Rita is an artist; Dan is a taciturn mountain on legs, Rita’s a surly woodland critter with an intolerance for nonsense. They’re a classic odd couple, and Ghostlight, as odd couple stories do, unspools surprising complementary traits in their differences.
De Leon’s screen presence dwarfs Kupferer’s, though he towers over her physically. The only time Dan reads as bigger in any meaningful sense pops up 50 minutes into the film, when Dan’s background becomes explicit. It’s a moment where every element that defines “cinema” synchronizes: Spartan writing leaves just enough space for Kupferer’s speech, soft-spoken bound by reticence, to breathe, while Thompson blocks the shot such that his lead is half in shadow, half in soft light, visible but obscured, a reflection of just how damn hard it is to open up about the angry gash across your spirit that’s stayed fresh for over a year.
Thompson isn’t a show-off; humanity is his focus, so he typically favors techniques and choices to highlight his cast. That humility dovetails with the driving force of Ghostlight along: the distraction Rita and the other actors can provide to Dan. He joins in, at first awkwardly, then with gusto as the days pass. Acting gives him clarity he lacks, the reconciliation he needs, and frankly a good excuse to avoid therapy.
Ghostlight could easily cultivate its characters as guides to one another, a group of lost souls who find redemptive catharsis through their friendships; in fairness, this is the role Rita plays to the reluctant, chagrined Dan. But the film’s thesis is about not human connection but humans’ connection to art, how we benefit from the presence of art in our lives, and what lonely, repressed existences we’d be damned to lead without it. Dan likes to call himself “old school,” a lazy brush-off to excuse his macho stoicism, but as he gets over his incredulity at the troupe’s warm-up exercises, and as he learns how to speak Shakespearean, he remembers what it is to be happy, and engaged in something for the sake of fulfillment rather than a paycheck.
Most of all, he finds in drama the tools to confront and process his grief. This is, Thompson and O’Sullivan argue, what the arts are for: Self-reflection. Confessing bereavement and acknowledging one’s failures are painful acts, and Dan’s performance in Romeo and Juliet isn’t a cure-all. But the truth is that people need art to survive, and to thrive.
Ghostlight’s argument in favor of art as essential to the soul is also a statement honoring creative endeavors as noble professions – as real work. Maybe Thompson’s aspirations aren’t as lofty as all that. Ultimately he cares most about his people. But caring about his people means caring about what they care about by default. Dan, Sharon, and Daisy each see bits of themselves in Shakespeare; it’s only logical that we should see bits of ourselves in them, too.
Director: Alex Thompson, Kelly O’Sullivan
Writer: Kelly O’Sullivan
Starring: Keith Kupferer, Dolly de Leon, Katherine Mallen Kupferer, Tara Mallen, Matthew C. Yee, Lia Cubilete
Release Date: January 18, 2024 (Sundance Film Festival)
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can follow him on Twitter and find his collected work at his personal blog He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.