Katharine Round | Uk Fantasy drama 64’
Ghost Town is a hauntingly offbeat road movie that turns a taxi into a confessional on wheels, traversing a Japanese coastal town where the ghosts of the 2011 tsunami refuse to stay buried.
Over the course of a single night, driver and passengers drift through a succession of encounters that blur the boundaries between the living and the dead, the tangible and the imagined. Some fares are decidedly more corporeal than others, but all have stories to tell, and the cab becomes a liminal space in which grief, memory and the supernatural share the back seat.
There are shades here of London, the recent Berlinale title whose diurnal encounters similarly unfold through conversations that gradually reveal the emotional lives of strangers. But Round takes the conceit into more uncanny territory, using the taxi’s restless progress through the darkness to explore a community still living in the long shadow of catastrophe. Here, the dead are not necessarily figures of terror; they are an intimate, persistent presence, woven into dreams, recollections and the mundane rhythms of everyday existence.
The film’s most intriguing proposition is that haunting need not involve anything as straightforward as a ghostly apparition. Instead, the past seeps into the present, making the supposedly solid distinction between survival and loss feel increasingly porous. Round’s magical-realist approach allows the supernatural to emerge almost casually, without the explanatory machinery that might diminish its mystery. The result is less a conventional ghost story than a meditation on the ways people accommodate the irreconcilable, finding room for the absent in lives that must somehow continue.
At 64 minutes, Ghost Town has the shape of an extended nocturne, its episodic structure lending it the intimacy of a collection of whispered secrets. Yet the same approach carries a risk: a procession of encounters can become more evocative than dramatically compelling, with atmosphere doing the work that character development and narrative momentum might otherwise provide. The challenge is to make each passenger feel like more than another fragment in a carefully assembled mosaic of sorrow.
Smooth and sepulchral, there is something soothingly audacious about a film that treats a disaster’s aftermath not as a historical event to be reconstructed but as an ongoing conversation between those who remain and those who have gone. Rather than attempting to exorcise the past, Round lets it ride along. Ghost Town may occasionally drift into preciousness, but its fusion of road movie, séance and intimate human testimony offers a distinctive take on the persistence of grief — and on the strange, consoling possibility that the dead are never entirely out of earshot.
IN UK CINEMAS FROM 6 NOVEMBER 2025