The personal and professional lives of Dan (Keith Kupferer) have become largely indistinguishable from one another at the start of “Ghostlight,” standing in the middle of a busy street to protect his co-workers on a demolition crew when he isn’t doing any drilling himself. The cars may fly dangerously close to him when directing traffic, but they seem less of a threat than he faces at home where his teenage daughter Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) has been put on indefinite leave from school after getting in a shoving match with a teacher and his wife Sharon (Tara Mallen) wonders how she can get through to her, or to him for that matter when their family appears to be in shambles and he seems to be standing by as helplessly as she is. In Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s winning follow-up to “Saint Frances,” something’s gotta give, but it isn’t in any realm that Dan could possibly have prior knowledge of, pulled into the theater of a local theater company by an actor (Dolly de Leon) tired of his hammering away outside and allowed the clarity of putting his mind elsewhere as he’s thrust into an early read through for a production of “Romeo and Juliet.”
One of the greatest romances of all time gives way to as lovely a tribute there could be to the healing power of art when Dan starts to pick up Shakespeare. Some suspension of disbelief is required to believe he’s never encountered it before, with his wife volunteering to direct the school play and his daughter coming off a production of “Oklahoma,” but it could be chalked up to an obliviousness that’s run throughout his life and has become particularly glaring in wake of a family tragedy, alluded to with the empty chair that now sits at the family dinner table. A civil lawsuit has been filed, but O’Sullivan and Thompson are less invested in the outcome of that than the way in which the prospect of acting opens up Dan to speaking about loss and how much others mean to him without having to express it more bluntly. The co-directors scored a casting coup when Kupferer is cast alongside his real-life wife and daughter, with the latter making the most of a particularly juicy role as a once-enthusiastic aspiring thespian who has retreated into snark with the unfortunate role she’s been recently cast in, and when the on-screen clan is brought into a law office to practice their testimony and critiqued by their lawyer as if they were on stage, the blurring of lines between what is performance, what isn’t and what artifice arises as protection is probed to fascinating effect.
Whereas it felt as if there was a slightly heightened realism in “Saint Frances” where every exchange felt like what you would’ve wanted to say in the moment if you were just a little quicker on your feet and every image had a casual beauty about it, O’Sullivan and Thompson push things a little further here when every conversation becomes a fantasy on some level, talking around subjects rather than directly to them and when O’Sullivan’s ear for lived-in dialogue remains on a level few can match, it can be truly bracing when sincerity can break through. A stirring score from Quinn Tsan bestows the kind of nobility that the characters deserve yet rarely get a sense of when they’re too busy trudging through, and the more that “Ghostlight” reveals itself to be a production, it cleverly pulls down the excuses people hide behind not to be real with one another, delivering a true work of art.
“Ghostlight” will screen at the Sundance Film Festival on January 22nd at 8:30 pm at the Redstone Cinemas 1 in Park City, January 26th at 9 am at the Egyptian Theatre in Park City, January 27th at 1:15 pm at the Broadway Centre Cinemas 6 and January 28th at noon at the Holiday Village Cinemas 1 in Park City.
