Ghostlight (2024)

a SIFF 2024 review

Confidently Unflinching Ghostlight Balances Shakespearean Tragedy with Real-World Catharsis

Ghostlight is a variation on William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet the likes of which I’ve never seen. Directors Kelly O’Sullivan (who also provides the exquisite screenplay) and Alex Thompson have delivered a hushed, confidently devastating, and ultimately hopeful drama that never follows a traditional path. Its story is an examination of grief, forgiveness, and mutual understanding that is told with skill, imagination, and unflinching objectivity. This film knocked me out.

Dan Mueller (Keith Kupferer) is a blue-collar construction worker working on neighborhood street repairs. He and his wife Sharon (Tara Mallen) are handling their teenage daughter Daisy’s (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) authority issues at her school with kid gloves even though she’s on the verge of being expelled. They are all grieving. More to the point, they are not talking much about what they are feeling to anyone, let alone one another, Dan most of all. He’s locked off his emotions, and right now he’s going through the motions of being the responsible worker, loving husband, and caring father he wants to still be.

One of the great things O’Sullivan and Thompson do here is to not overexplain or to reveal the reasons for this trio’s various interpersonal maelstroms too quickly. It’s clear something terrible has happened, and it’s equally apparent that in the wake of this unimaginable pain, they’ve all decided it’s best to try to stick together as a family no matter how difficult that may be.

But it’s all an illusion. They’ve created a veil of normalcy that conceals the truth from the rest of the world. Dan and Daisy joke about things and verbally spar. Dan brushes Sharon’s hand or tries to give her a passing look of gentle understanding when he thinks she needs it, but never asks if she actually does. If it’s not all quite a lie, it is close enough to one that problems will arise, and walking through the day’s events in a zombified stupor is unsurprisingly unhealthy for all three of them.

It is the little cracks in the façade that allow O’Sullivan and Thompson to open things up to reveal a much grander, heartbreakingly stark picture. Dan gets into an altercation with an entitled motorist while on the job, and he’s lucky he only gets suspended from his supervisory position and not fired. For reasons best not explained in too great of detail, urged on by the forcefully insistent Rita (Dolly De Leon), the next thing the dour workaholic everyman knows he’s rehearsing for a community theater production of Romeo and Juliet. Originally tasked with playing the apothecary, events take an even more twisted turn and Dan ends up portraying an age-appropriate Romeo alongside the equally middle-aged Rita. Needless to say, he keeps all of this a secret from Sharon and Daisy.

The kicker? The event everyone in the Mueller family is dealing with — or, more specifically, not dealing with — is the loss of another family member to suicide. Now Dan is appearing in one of the most famous plays in human history and what is it about? Suicide. Life and art collide, and how all three Muellers deal with this surreal situation will likely go a long way toward whether or not they heal as a family or continue to drift even further apart as individuals.

Everything here works, especially all the bits concerning father and daughter. Daisy is a former theater kid who immediately retreated away from the stage when tragedy hit their family. Something gets reawakened inside the teen when her curmudgeonly dad starts asking questions about Shakespeare. Real-life father and daughter Keith and Katherine Mallen Kupferer bounce off one another with ease and slip into a triumphantly cozy dynamic. Their chemistry is off the charts.

O’Sullivan and Thompson don’t miss a trick. Their community theater troupe is a diverse mixed bag of ages, genders, sexual orientations, and backgrounds, and each has come to this production for reasons entirely their own. We get delicate snapshots of who they are. In turn, this grounds things in a charmingly untidy reality that’s instantaneously authentic. Veteran character actor De Leon, light years from her scene-stealing work in Triangle of Sadness, is particularly outstanding, and a scene where Rita cleverly tricks Daisy into taking over for her on the microphone during a karaoke outing is nothing short of inspired.

As sensational as all of this is, it is that central idea of having a grieving, inarticulate father step into the shoes of one of Shakespeare’s most famous teenage protagonists that predictably packs the most unforgettable wallop. O’Sullivan’s screenplay melds two worlds into one, and by having Dan interpret Romeo through the eyes of a distraught father, the filmmaker takes all of her characters into dark, emotional caverns from which they cannot escape.

Yet, instead of reopening wounds, this journey gets them to finally start healing. If overall catharsis remains a work in progress for the Mueller family, there is a sense they’re on the right path to getting there once the curtain on the play closes and the difficulties of their day-to-day struggles restart. Ghostlight is one of the year’s best films.

Film Rating: 4 (out of 4)