Tivoli Theatre – After Hours Film Society Presents Ghostlight

CAST & CREW
Directed by Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson
Featuring Keith Kupferer, Katherine Mallen Kupferer, Tara Mallen
115 mins.
Rated R

Reviewed by Bilge Ebiri | Vulture

When melancholic construction worker Dan finds himself drifting from his wife and daughter, he discovers community and purpose in a local theater’s production of Romeo and Juliet. As the drama onstage starts to mirror his own life, he and his family are forced to confront a personal loss.

I wandered into Ghostlight early one afternoon this past January at the Sundance Film Festival. I didn’t know anything about the picture; it was simply playing at the right time and was just the right length to keep me off the street for a couple of hours. I didn’t even know what genre it belonged to. (For some reason, I had a vague thought that it might be a nature documentary. This turned out to be hilariously incorrect.) Two hours and a few waves of uncontrollable tears later, I walked out of the theater in a wondrous daze. This is one of the great things about film festivals: You can experience movies as a blank slate, before people like me get to them. Ghostlight is strong enough to stand on its own, but I wish everyone could experience it as I did. Or, to put it another way: Ghostlight is one of the best movies of the year, and if that’s a meaningful enough statement for you, then feel free to stop reading now.

It’s not that Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s picture is filled with twists or surprises or anything like that, nor does its story represent some kind of left-field provocation. If anything, it’s a modest film, one that works its charms softly as it quietly opens a little door into other people’s lives. Maybe that’s why I’m wary of ruining it by holding it up too closely to the light. Ghostlight follows one family, and in particular the father, Dan (Keith Kupferer), a burly, easily distracted road-crew worker with a hot temper. His emotionally troubled daughter, Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer, the actor’s actual offspring), has just been suspended from school for aggressively pushing a teacher, a punishment reduced from expulsion thanks to the pleadings of Dan’s wife, Sharon (Tara Mallen — Keith’s real wife and Katherine’s real mom), who also teaches at the same school and is struggling to keep the family together and sane.

One day, after another one of Dan’s own blowups at work, a curious woman, Rita (Dolly De Leon), beckons him into the semi-abandoned storefront where she and a ragtag group of actors are busy rehearsing a no-budget, amateur production of Romeo and Juliet. It’s an impulsive decision for both of them: Rita thinks that an hour in their presence, doing imagination exercises, might help him get away from whatever’s troubling him; Dan, for his part, has nothing better to do. But he’s soon drawn to the easy camaraderie of this makeshift theater troupe and the elegant power of Shakespeare’s prose, even though he admits he doesn’t understand any of it.

For much of its running time, the film only hints at what’s actually troubling Dan and his family. It’s not a secret, exactly — the clues are pretty easy to put together — but the revelation of their tragedy still hurts like a kick to the teeth. O’Sullivan and Thompson flirt with something that ordinarily would feel like a narrative cheat: hiding from the audience an important piece of backstory that is otherwise known by most of the characters in the story. (Some of the more annoying movie twists work in this fashion.) In Ghostlight, however, it feels emotionally true, because the family itself refuses to acknowledge what’s happened. It’s not until they’re finally meeting with their attorney, wriggling like insects pinned to a wall, when we start to get the full, brutal picture. They, too, are dancing around their trauma — understandably so, because it’s too awful to bear.

That the event in question bears more than a passing resemblance to the Shakespeare play being rehearsed might seem a bit too narratively convenient. But it’s actually more than that — it’s fantastical. That’s where the filmmaking comes in. O’Sullivan and Thompson keep their cameras fixed on Dan, and on the almost magical way he’s pulled into this world. There’s something unreal about all this; for all the muted realism of its performances and its everyday milieu, Ghostlight plays at times like a kind of spectral fantasy. Or, more accurately, like one of those experiences when real life briefly feels like it’s edged into a spectral fantasy. Its rhythms shift, as the warm interactions of the troupe contrast sharply with the drab legalese and agonizing emotional accounting required in the world beyond the theater’s walls. In the end, it becomes a film about the world-changing power of artistic communion, about how creativity, compassion, and forgiveness — of oneself and others — are all pit stops on the same human journey.

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Ghostlight review: Community-minded drama is a small, bespoke gem
Throwback movie serves up a redemptive story about the personal roads of grief we all must travel
Reviewed by Brent Simon | AC Club

Hollywood studios have, over the last quarter-century, uncannily missed no opportunity to undercut the value proposition of their product. But under-discussed among the myriad reasons for cinema’s increasingly slack grasp on our collective culture is a very simple and straightforward one: Much of the most popular American cinema is now so baroque as to be unrecognizable.

Genre playgrounds are fantastic and especially alluring gateways of filmic enticement for younger audiences. And they can continue to hold rich rewards for an entire lifetime. But what of movies that reflect real-world travails, or try to turn a mirror back on modern society, maturing along with viewers and subtly reminding us we’re not alone? Largely gone (or banished to streaming) are the sort of “meat-and-potatoes” contemporary films which for decades populated multiplexes as part of the cinematic ecosystem.

A pleasant surprise, then, that one of the undisputed highlights of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival was a simple, throwback, redemptive story about the personal roads of grief we all must travel. Co-directed by Alex Thompson and screenwriter Kelly O’Sullivan, Ghostlight counts among its stars a real-life married couple and their daughter, feeding its sense of authenticity. The result is a small, bespoke gem about finding constructive channels for deep and uncomfortable feelings.

In an Illinois suburb, construction worker Dan (Keith Kupferer) is gripped by an emotional constipation that’s left him increasingly adrift from his wife Sharon (Tara Mallen) and their teenage daughter Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), who’s facing a threat of school expulsion for her latest incident of rebellious acting out.

Bits and pieces of the reason for this strife are parceled out, as the family takes an awkward meeting to discuss practicing for a deposition connected to a looming lawsuit. Daisy is in therapy for anger management and other issues, but Dan, in the classic mold of a stoic male, resists. When Dan snaps at work, though, this fleeting moment of public rage catches the attention of actress Rita (Dolly De Leon), who sports Adidas Sambas and a “Straight Outta Cookies” T-shirt, with a spunky attitude to match.

Sensing something, Rita pulls Dan into a table read and pitches him on joining her barebones community theater production of Romeo & Juliet, despite his unfamiliarity with the source text. Dan is outright dismissive at first, then skeptical, but he finds himself drawn back to the group’s rehearsals—a development which he keeps secret from his wife and daughter.

As the movie unspools, the unspecified trauma hanging over the family—and the complicated, sometimes at-odds feelings the three of them have—comes into sharper focus. This family drama and healing then plays out against the backdrop of several twists and turns leading up to the play’s opening night.

On a certain level, it’s true that the logline of Ghostlight reads like an overly precious and contrived tale of code-cracked repression, one of two main types of self-consciously independent productions that have plagued American film festivals over the past 15 years. But any prejudiced sense of dismissal or even pause one might have quickly melts away.

Co-directors O’Sullivan and Thompson (whose previous collaboration Saint Frances picked up two prizes, including the Audience Award, at its South by Southwest debut in 2019), capably oversee a modest and straightforward technical package that yields unfussy charms. The film’s sharp eye for character detail and naturalistic blend of low-key humor and pathos, nicely captured in wide frames by cinematographer Luke Dyra, overcome its slightly heightened emotional pitch and innate eagerness to please.

It’s difficult to say enough positive things about the work of the Kupferers and Mallens. It’s true that the fact they’re a real family undoubtedly assists in their ability to convey complicated family dynamics, their genuine connection giving them a useful shorthand. But they are also intuitive and gifted performers in their own ways, and each wholly dialed in with the tone and intent of their directors.

Not merely content to trade in familiar notes of lived-in blue-collar gruffness, Kupferer brings a welcome multi-dimensionality to Dan. This is characterized by a full menu of ambivalence and contradictions as he fumbles his way into the world of acting, compelled in a way he can’t quite articulate to find a grander meaning that works for him.

Mallen Kupferer, meanwhile, communicates the feeling that her occasionally uncorked firehose of teenage anger is at least partly performative; she knows what she’s doing, and is at times just seeking a (new, different) reaction from her parents. A game assortment of Chicago-based repertory players also rounds out the supporting cast, giving them a depth not always on the page.

At its most basic, Ghostlight is a film about grief and the utility of community in processing it, and if that seems obvious, it’s still fairly piercing as rendered here. O’Sullivan’s script connects certain scenes from William Shakespeare’s timeless romantic tragedy to some of the misfortune and swallowed sentiments in Dan, Daisy, and Sharon’s lives. It builds in natural, well-calibrated ways to a genuine catharsis.

But Ghostlight is also, more broadly, about the timeless ability of art to tether and connect us, and why we need it. For film enthusiasts, that message is likely catnip. What further elevates the movie, though, is its sharply drawn secondary thesis, and thrumming emotional bass line: That there is, at various times in life, inordinate value in finding not just other relationships but also a deeper kinship outside of blood relations. In a world increasingly marked by tribalistic identification and a considerably megaphoned fear and belittling of “others” by powerful political and online voices, this very simple idea is, in its own way, quietly radical.

Finding “one’s people” is valuable, no doubt. But even more essential is the first step, something with which sadly a lot of people seem to struggle: there is plenty to love about and learn from individuals whose experiences and deeper interests don’t immediately seem to overlap with our own.

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‘Ghostlight’ Review: ‘Saint Frances’ Team Returns with Another Tender Gem About the Power of Human Connection
Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson craft another charming, funny, and very human exploration of the bonds that alter the course of our lives. Plus: Shakespeare!
BY Kate Erbland | Indiewire

Most reviews of Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson‘s tender dramedy “Ghostlight” are likely to start with a definition of the title (as Playbill tells us, “a single bulb left burning whenever a theatre is dark,” and one that might be in place to chase away bad spirits to boot), but we’ll try to subvert that expectation a bit here (after all, that’s just what O’Sullivan and Thompson do).

Instead, we’ll open with a quote from this publication (and this very writer) on the pair’s uncanny knack for making gems that have loglines that don’t (that can’t) do justice to the tales they spin. The pair’s first feature, the similarly winning “Saint Frances,” packed what seemed like a downer of a description: “After an accidental pregnancy turned abortion, a deadbeat nanny finds an unlikely friendship with the 6-year-old she’s charged with protecting.” As the duo told IndieWire in 2021, “We struggled with that line too. It’s so funny, every time we describe the movie, we just want to say like, ‘We know, but—’” (that’s O’Sullivan), with Thompson cutting in, “It’s funny! It’s good!”
Such is the case with the pair’s follow-up “Ghostlight” (this time around, screenwriter O’Sullivan joins Thompson behind the camera for her feature directorial debut), which also sports a seemingly sad logline: “When a construction worker unexpectedly joins a local theater’s production of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ the drama onstage starts to mirror his own life.” That’s all true, but it’s also, just like “Saint Frances,” funny and good. And, in all that funniness and goodness and very real drama, something rare: a film that makes you marvel at the pleasure of storytelling as an actual practice, not an oft-repeated buzzword with little actual emotion behind it.

Of course, this story could not be told without players on the stage, including a real-life acting family forming the heart of the film. Keith Kupferer is Dan Mueller (the construction worker of the synopsis), with his wife Tara Mallen starring as Dan’s wife Sharon (a theater teacher and the soul of the family), plus their daughter Katherine Mallen Kupferer (who some may recognize from last year’s charming “Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret”) as their troubled daughter Daisy.

We know things aren’t right in the Mueller family long before O’Sullivan and Thompson ever-so-delicately dole out the details of a tragedy that still pulls at the trio. It involves a looming lawsuit, the sense the family is incomplete, unsaid feelings, and an ultimate reveal too artfully handled to be spoiled here. O’Sullivan and Thompson are aces at tucking themes, concepts, and ideas into their films that, in other directors’ hands, might feel a bit cheesy or chintzy. Instead, the duo handles them with the utmost respect and care. Audiences may eventually start to see where this is heading and how it will all braid together, but that doesn’t dilute the joy of seeing it actually unfold.

It’s that tragedy that haunts Dan, making him volatile, mad, and sometimes outright mean. After an on-the-job outburst is witnessed by a local community theater group (led by a delightful Dolly De Leon, who plays the spiky and outspoken Rita), Dan finds himself unexpectedly pulled into their orbit. He doesn’t know much about the production they are putting on (even if it is the most famous Shakespeare play), a detail that takes on added resonance when we learn about Sharon’s job and Daisy’s own theatrical streak. Dan could have been a theater buff this whole time, just like the ladies in his life, but he’s been too stuck in his ways (and his pain) to see the magic of one of our oldest art forms.

But Rita and her “Island of Misfit Toys” compatriots — a motley crew who all get their moments to shine — change that, slowly intriguing Dan enough that the man just keeps showing up at their rehearsals. One day, he’s barely able to get out a line; the next, he’s gotten the hang of iambic pentameter (Daisy has, unknowingly, helped). But while that might sound a little too easy, it’s not. Dan struggles. Sharon struggles. And Daisy? Well, Daisy feels everything, times two (Mallen Kupferer is just delightful as a potty-mouthed teen with a heart of gold). Yet, as Dan starts to slip more deeply into the magic of the theater, even the ramshackle type of community theater Rita and her crew embody (hell, maybe because of that ramshackle-ness), he can’t help but change, evolve, grow. Turns out, being around people can be… nice?
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O’Sullivan and Thompson gently fold their story together, finding humor and heart at every turn (even a subplot that briefly hinges on Sharon and Daisy believing Dan is having an affair with Rita is handled with the utmost grace), leading to the kind of ending that somehow inspired the film’s very first audience at Sundance to laugh and cry. Again, we know how this sounds, but — it’s funny! and good! And a reminder of how bright a light one story can shine on everyone.
Grade: A-

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