‘Ghost Boy' Review: Rodney Ascher's Doc Is An Extraordinary Story Of Human Resilience

Yahoo

08-03-2025

Like Alexandre O. Philippe, Rodney Ascher is a director who pushes the interpretive limits of what a documentary can do, something he made abundantly clear with his 2012 film Room 237. Named after the mysterious hotel suite in The Shining, this festival favorite gave a platform to some of the most bizarre readings of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror imaginable. The theories raised ranged from the esoteric to the ridiculous, but Ascher's straightforward, non-judgmental approach proved surprisingly effective; though it has long been debunked, the fanciful thought that Kubrick made the film to exorcize his guilt about faking the moon landing footage in 1969 is enticing and still hard to shake off.
Ghost Boy contains some of that, being such an unbelievable true story that it's almost impossible not to wonder how such a thing can happen, and just how many people have been affected by it: in very real terms, it's the movie equivalent of someone walking over your grave. But, more significantly, it's a companion piece to 2015's The Nightmare, Ascher's feature-length follow-up to Room 237. Mixing traditional doc methods with recreations and creepy genre-movie inflections, that film provided an unsettling exploration of sleep paralysis, a condition in which the mind is wide awake, but the body is frozen.
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Anyone alarmed by that proposition will probably want to give Ascher's latest film a wide berth, since it tells the story of Martin Pistorius, South African author of the 2011 memoir Ghost Boy: The Miraculous Escape of a Misdiagnosed Boy Trapped Inside His Own Body. Narrated entirely by text-to-voice software — a device that Ascher sets up quite ingeniously by focusing on the excruciating silence around Pistorius as he laboriously taps away his opening comments on a laptop in a film studio — the film is literally the book come to life, starting with the strange events of 1987 that took a terrifying turn.
Just as he lost his voice, Pistorius lost all memories of his childhood after falling, very gradually, into a waking coma that lasted 12 years. He recalls the family dog Pookie, his precocious gift for electronics, and his fierce protection of his 'Lego-filled kingdom', but these are all things he learned after coming back from the abyss. This is no exaggeration; Pistorius constantly compares his locked-in condition to being trapped underwater and likens his gradual reawakening to a deep-sea diver finally coming up for air.
Thankfully, Pistorius is something of a poet, and his descriptions of being 'lost in the infinity of time' — measuring the passing hours in terms of day and night, and the rituals of his care routine — are as eloquent as they are sobering. He also has a great sense of humor, saying that by the time he was consigned to a wheelchair, 'I resembled a pot plant, something to be given water and left in a corner.' That Pistorius can laugh about anything at all is a minor miracle in itself, knowing that his condition almost drove his mother to a nervous breakdown and recalling her saying — to his face — 'You must die. You have to die.'
The reverse of Benjamin Ree's recent Oscar near-miss The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, Ghost Boy goes on to explore the bizarre phenomenon of being an eyewitness to one's own life, with Pistorius learning about adolescence and adulthood as an alien would, by observation rather an experience ('It was as if a boy had died,' he says, 'and then I remembered that he had'). He also learned a lot about human cruelty, after being left in care homes where he was force-fed, pinched, slapped and, it is suggested, a whole lot worse.
At an ambitious 95 minutes, Ghost Boy tends to lag in places, but both director and narrator are aware of their story's potential to get stuck in a groove, and both are there to pick up the slack whenever it's needed. Like all of Ascher's films (notably 2021's A Glitch in the Matrix), it manages to humanize the unthinkable, and its subject will continue to haunt you long after the closing credits. It also sets up a killer punchline, involving a showdown with Barney the Dinosaur at Universal Studios in Florida. How could anyone be mad at Barney, you might wonder? This extraordinary story will tell you exactly why.
Title: Ghost BoyFestival: SXSW (Visions)Director: Rodney AscherSales agent: CAARunning time: 1 hr 35 mins
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