Finnegan's Wake: An Immersive Ghost Story, presented by 13th Floor Theater, plunges audience members into the beautiful, dysfunctional Finnegan-Plurabelle family. Scenic designer Treigh Buchet, lighting designer Meghan Schultz, and ephemera designer Michelle Josette Crashette transfigure the San Francisco Mint into an Irish family home on the banks of a mystical river. Audience members are free to explore the spaces before the show begins with libation in hand. When the dinner bell rings, the show commences.
One of America's greatest living fiction writers returns with his first novel since 2018's Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize. In Vigil, the dying CEO of an oil company gets the Scrooge treatment when the ghost of a woman returns from the afterlife to help him cross over. If that sounds similar to Lincoln in the Bardo, don't be fooledthis one hits different. Despite its shorter length, Vigil is an equally powerful exploration of memory, compassion, and atonement.
Billy Wilder's film starring Gloria Swanson as a reclusive former silent movie star, and William Holden as a young wannabe writer who becomes her kept man, more than ever looks not merely like tinseltown satire or LA noir, but a ghost story. It's the ultimate film about how the screenwriter is always the loser and the chump. You can tell that Norma Desmond (Swanson) is washed up because she has actually written a screenplay which is, however, more than Joe (Holden) ever achieves in the course of this film.
It's a deeply pensive ghost story with a difference, following Jack (Dacre Montgomery), a man who learns about his mother, Elizabeth who abandoned him as a child via unconventional means. She speaks to him through her widowed wife, Jill (Vicky Krieps), after her death by suicide. And vice versa, she can also enter Jack and speak to Jill, creating a strange dynamic with three characters in two bodies.
Those in peril at sea are the subject of this arresting ghost story from Cornish film-maker Mark Jenkin. Set in a fishing village, it explores the intimate presence of death and the disquieting claustrophobia of family and community qualities often assumed to be eternal virtues. Maybe a film of just this kind was always what Jenkin's distinct film language was waiting for.
Greene's tale delves into a resurrection of childhood fears and imagined horrors experienced by a terrified solo male traveler as he reads supernatural stories in bed on a stormy night.