Ghostlight Review | For the Searchers Who Trod the Boards

While it looks empathetically and thoughtfully at the healing power of the arts, one’s opinion of Ghostlight will vary based on how they view writer-directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s material. I suspect Ghostlight is one of those endeavours that some will find tremendously moving and austere in its approach, while others will look at the same film and think it’s corny, pandering, and obvious. I can see the value in both arguments, as Thompson and O’Sullivan’s follow-up to their tremendous debut feature collaboration Saint Frances is all in how it hits the viewer. On one hand, I was disappointed that Ghostlight didn’t hit as hard as it should and that it was filled with obvious sentiments designed to move the viewer to tears that never came. On the other, it’s a fully realized, creatively mounted, and playful tweaking of several well worn concepts at the same time. It can be simplistic and tricky in the same breath, which leads to an uneven final form, but also something more interesting than a project pitched straight down the middle.

Construction worker Dan (Keith Kupferer) has been having a rough go of things. His teenage daughter, Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), has been rebelling at home and school, causing no small number of headaches. He loves his wife, Sharon (Tara Mallen), but lately they’ve been getting on each other’s nerves. In addition to Daisy fighting expulsion from school, the entire family is currently embroiled in a lengthy lawsuit that’s adding to the emotional strain. One day at work, Dan snaps and has a meltdown. Dan’s moment of frustrated weakness is witnessed by an equally frustrated and world weary actor named Rita (an amusingly spicy and frank Dolly De Leon), who’s rehearsing her role in an upcoming, ragtag production of Romeo and Juliet with a community theatre company operating out of a space next to his construction site. Sensing Dan might need an outlet for his emotions, Rita coaxes him into joining the cast. Although skeptical at first and boasting no acting experience, the process helps Dan to better understand what’s going on in his own life outside the stage.

Ghostlight always walks a fine line, and quite often it feels like O’Sullivan and Thompson want to have things both ways. While Ghostlight and its cast of seasoned stage actors are producing a love letter to the restorative powers of being someone else for awhile, they’re also delivering a familiar feeling bit of quirk that revolves around the sort of misfits and outcasts that do community theatre in the first place. It’s not a film that laughs at its characters with derision, but it doesn’t do anything new with the idea of following small town actors as they continue to pursue their passions while away from brighter lights. As a comedy, it’s only effective whenever O’Sullivan and Thompson’s humour is used to cut through darker, more truthful moments.

Ghostlight also builds itself around big revelations that are unnecessarily drawn out and easy to spot coming. Thompson and O’Sullivan spend a lot of time dancing around what really happened to Dan and his family, but that big reveal arrives too late and long after most astute viewers will have caught on to the overall meaning of the meta material. While individual moments of denial, grief, and remorse are psychologically rich and wonderfully performed by the actors, O’Sullivan and Thompson hold off on stating why these things truly resonate because they believe they’re sitting on a major twist. The subtext and symbolism are piled on thickly in Ghostlight, to a point where everyone wishes O’Sullivan and Thompson would just get on with it instead of flirting with full on emotional manipulation, but at least there’s substance to back things up. The experience of Ghostlight left me feeling at times a bit like a bench judge in a court of law. The line of questioning by the lawyers is leading and potentially inappropriate, but I’m willing to allow it because they insist this is leading somewhere.

And it ultimately does because the overarching point of Ghostlight is to examine a family with the shared determination to not discuss what’s really on their minds. Dan, Daisy, and Sharon (all played by a real life family of stage legends, which adds a bit to the electric chemistry they have together) are all deeply entrenched in avoidance, but they have different ways of expressing their rage and sadness. They criticize each other for being the kinds of people who flee when the going gets tough, without realizing they are all guilty of doing the same exact thing. They need therapy desperately, but only one of them (Daisy) is actually following through on it, and even that is court ordered.

Dan’s journey to self-awareness and recovery comes on stage, and while Ghostlight never claims that doing stage work is a substitute for professional help, it does nicely illustrate how community theatre is a valid art form because it almost always means more to the performers than it does to the audience. Through that reflection, it becomes more obvious why Dan needs this release and outside the box opportunity. The fact that the play offers some obvious counterpoints that can help Dan parse what his family has been going through is just icing on the cake. Acting in community theatre is like screaming into a void, but in a good way. It’s low stakes and endlessly cathartic.

I didn’t like Ghostlight all that much, even after writing about it in great length and singing it’s obvious praises. I also can’t deny that I am still thinking about what it’s saying and how it goes about delivering its messages days after watching it. I’m not sold on the means, but I’m certainly sold on the message. You can only grade a film (or play) based on what’s presented before you, not the version you would’ve made if tasked with putting on the same production with a more personal spin. Based on what was presented to me, Ghostlight comes across as good, but not great. But looking beyond the craft and sometimes overly flowery and precious script, and there’s a lot that I like lurking beneath the surface, which seems to be the driving force behind the entire production. It’s a film about people wrestling with feelings they can’t describe, and for both better and worse, it will leave the viewer feeling similarly.

Ghostlight opens at TIFF Lightbox in Toronto on Friday, June 28, 2024.