Ghostlight (now streaming on AMC+) is gearing up to be 2024’s biggest critical sleeper hit, a teeny-tiny film that has been lauded as a heartwarming tearjerker since its Sundance debut. It’s a labor of love from filmmakers Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, who shot the film in their home city of Chicago, with local actors, including husband-wife-daughter leads Keith Kupferer, Tara Mallen and Katherine Mallen Kupferer. It’s a story about a buttoned-up man who’s working through personal tragedy and finds much-needed “therapy” by participating in a local theater production. Review spoiler alert: You’ve got to see this lovely little film.
GHOSTLIGHT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Dan (Kupferer) draws the curtain open and looks at the dark spot on the lawn. He’s up before the roosters for his road-construction gig. He’s busy annoying the local small business owners with noisy heavy machinery when he gets a phone call. His teen daughter Daisy (Mallen Kupferer) is in trouble at school. Again. Dan and his wife-slash-Daisy’s-mom Sharon (Mallen) converge in the principal’s office. Daisy is big and loud and rebellious and obnoxious and isn’t afraid to drop f-bombs in front of all of them – and she’s being expelled. Dan bargains her down to suspension, with the promise that she’ll attend therapy. At $150 an hour, he sighs. He goes back to work and resumes being nearly run over by jerks in Jags who speed through construction zones, and cursed at by the tiny woman in the dumpy little playhouse who’s sick of all the jackhammering and whatnot.
Now Dan is a pretty average guy, blue collar, drives a truck, family man, low key, doesn’t say much. He’s prone to angry outbursts, though. Maybe that’s why he and Daisy get along so well. They seem pretty tight. Birds of a feather, the apple doesn’t fall far, etc. And if you’re wondering why he and Sharon tend to shrug off their daughter’s disruptive antics, which seem a little extreme and above the norm – well, we’ll get to that. Dan and Sharon go to bed, and he derails her attempts at foreplay by bringing up the lawsuit they’re filing. They have to prepare for the deposition, he says, and is Sharon sure she wants to go through with it still? I guess he’s not in the mood.
Remember the tiny woman? That’s Rita (Donna de Leon). Dan’s out there in his orange vest and hardhat one day and she ropes him into the theater. They need someone to fill in for a table reading. Romeo and Juliet. Now, Dan strikes us as a guy who’s more Chicago Bears than Shakespeare, but he just doesn’t seem up to resisting anything these days. Daisy goes to the counselor and Dan gets roped into the room there, too, but he’s definitely up for resisting that. Is Daisy the only problem around here? Not at all. Dan’s avoiding something. Meanwhile, he keeps leaving work early to rehearse with his fellow “thespians,” who seem like a group of lovable weirdos, but not in the broad comedy-movie sense, more of a realistic passion-for-the-theatre-with-an-r-e sense. They talk him into taking a role in what’s gearing up to be an amusingly amateurish staging of one of the Bard’s greatest works. But dammit, these people are committed, and they love it, and they feel it, and it’s very meaningful for them.
Of course, acting means opening up and being vulnerable, and Dan isn’t up for that. It’ll take some work, some persuasion. He keeps his theater endeavors a secret from Sharon and Daisy. It’s so out of character for him. He finds it embarrassing, even though it would be welcomed: Sharon teaches drama to middle-schoolers, and Daisy used to love being in school musicals before – well, before her older brother died. Suicide. Dan takes part in all the little exercises that theater people do, and slowly warms up. He’s making friends. It seems, dare I say it, therapeutic, functional in a way that talking to a counselor isn’t, at least for him. They wrap up rehearsal one day and he asks Rita why she dragged him in here. “It looked like you wanted to be someone else for a while,” she replies.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Ghostlight is an against-all-odds functional combination of the real-world-tragedy intensity of Mass with the amateur-theater spoofy comedy of Waiting for Guffman. (It also might take a cue from the real-life Romeo and Juliet-like drama of the documentary I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter.)
Performance Worth Watching: Kupferer’s performance is workmanlike and elementary in all the right ways, reflecting the film’s grounded tone and grassroots production. There are no showy Oscar clips here, and the film is all the better for it.
Memorable Dialogue: The troupe FINALLY gets through the climactic death scene, prompting director Lanora’s (Hannah Dworkin) relief: “Aaaaannnnd they’re dead. Thank Christ.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Ghostlight takes the shopworn let’s-put-on-a-show plot and renders it endearingly realistic, poignant and heartfelt. And don’t just deposit it on the growing pile of modern Grief And Loss movies either; it’s a naturalistic film that doesn’t pile on the intensity until it squeezes you right out of the room, but rather alleviates some of the weight of its wrenchingly sad situation with comedy that’s unique to the rhythms of everyday life. Although O’Sullivan’s screenplay sometimes works a little too hard to contrive parallels between Romeo and Juliet and Dan’s life, the film never feels phony or overwrought – and those contrivances are forgivable once you realize how they open up a level of character development that’s earnestly inspiring. It’s hopeful. Optimistic. A movie about healing. It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that.
O’Sullivan and Thompson establish an easy, salt-of-the-earth tone and pace that mirrors their protagonist’s pragmatism. The film finds agency in its balance of the frequently funny theater stuff and the heavier domestic drama. Scenes in which Dan and Daisy go to the batting range or simply share conversation in the car are simple but revelatory, a marriage of good writing and strong, committed performances. Same goes for the moments reflecting the strain in Dan and Sharon’s marriage. Nothing ever strays too far from recognizable emotion. Nothing feels overly written. Everything feels sincere, and that’s the film’s core strength.
Theater People – you know who you are – will surely enjoy the attention to detail and inside jokes embedded in scenes depicting the lead-up to the play. But speaking as someone who knows he’s not a Theater Person, the film isn’t alienating, but rather, a glimpse into a specific subculture that celebrates art for art’s sake. Whether the art is “good” or “bad” is utterly irrelevant. Rita and the troupe are so pure of heart and intention that they don’t care how silly they look, or – and this is implied rather than stated outright – whether they actually get to perform in front of others. They do it for themselves and each other, and we benefit from Dan’s perspective as he learns what it’s all about, and picks up little metaphorical life lessons that embellish the primary theme here, the fundamental truth that bottling up your emotions is toxic to your mental health. When life puts poison in your hand, you don’t need to swallow it.
Our Call: Again – lovely little movie. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.