A Ghost Waits
Things aren’t good with Jack. His neighbours are “the cockroach kings of Cincinnati,” and while he should be pleased that they are finally fumigating their apartment it means he is homeless for a few days with nobody to turn to, so despite it being a breach of protocol he will be in a sleeping bag at work until further notice.
Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, rather than an office or a factory floor his work is assessing and fixing up recently vacated rental homes, this one a particular thorn in the side of his employer where without fail every tenant has broken their lease and jumped ship, sometimes in the middle of the night and often leaving their belongings behind.
With doors opening and closing, objects moving, even vanishing – including the pizza he just had delivered moments before – and strange dreams, Jack soon reaches the obvious conclusion the house is haunted, but with a job to do, nowhere else to go to and no friends to turn to for advice or support, he is determined to ride it out; he simply has no other choice.
The debut feature of Adam Stovall, the world premiere of A Ghost Waits in the Friday evening slot of FrightFest at Glasgow Film Festival was a hugely emotional affair both for the writer/director and the audience, a monochrome romantic comedy of downtrodden souls whose colour comes from the shining performances of They Look Like People‘s MacLeod Andrews as Jack and Natalie Walker as defiant “spectral agent” Muriel.
Achieved for a shoestring budget, A Ghost Waits is not an artistic statement so much as a personal one, the shooting style reminiscent of nothing so much as Clerks, and like Kevin Smith’s debut it is entirely carried by the script and the lead actors, sympathetic and heartbreakingly honest, each of them utterly alone and overlooked by all that is good in life and death yet resolved to make the best of what they have without feeling sorry for themselves.
A darker turn on Beetlejuice, the moments of levity in A Ghost Waits are a departure from the heavy character drama with which Andrews is associated and a necessity, for as engaging and uplifting as Stovall’s film is at times it is not an easy watch, the purely fantastical redemption presented in the final act that of a man who, had he alternatives, should have taken them, whose few friends will forever regret that they did not respond better when he asked for help.
The Glasgow Film Festival concluded on Sunday 8th March
A Ghost Waits will be available streaming on the Arrow channel from Monday 1st February 2021
