From Life
2018 · 8m · United Kingdom
Directed by Uli Meyer
Genres: drama, fantasy, mystery
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Artist Godfrey keeps sketching a beautiful woman in a churchyard, increasingly convinced she is a ghost rather than a stranger.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The ghost-or-not premise is familiar enough that Meyer has to work harder to justify it, and honestly the film plays it straight when it could've gone weirder—the contemplative melancholy is tasteful but safe, which feels like a missed opportunity for something genuinely unsettling.
Meyer works deliberately within the romantic supernatural tradition—the churchyard setting, the sketch-as-evidence motif, the ambiguity about presence—and executes with formal control; the pacing and image composition feel aware of their lineage in a way that rewards close viewing.
The decision to let us see almost nothing of the woman's face, to keep her half-rendered in Godfrey's sketches rather than fully present, is what makes this work—it's a single formal constraint that transforms the entire emotional register from ghost story into something about obsession and incompleteness.