Avis Metacritic

Ghost Town Anthology percolates with the sadness of a place bracing for its untimely death–a landscape populated by psychically damaged wanderers, fumbling after an identity within and beyond the town that wouldn’t exist without them, and vice versa.

Inviting mystery, ambiguity, and a pervasive sense of unease, Ghost Town Anthology is an entrancing yet unsettling allegory that builds like the pressure of an approaching storm that never quite arrives.

Mysteries remain mysteries, and the value isn’t in finding answers but in emotionally exploring where the questions take you.

He and Côté write an ode to human resilience; they compose a soliloquy about lost identities; they paint a portrait of people seeking meaning, guidance, warmth. The result is a soulful cinematic treatise on the gradual, painful loss of a city’s soul.

Ghost Town Anthology lacks the human touch it needs to satisfy beyond its symbolism, but if Côté’s 96-minute curio takes far too long to thaw, it’s never more spookily enthralling than in its final moments.

You don’t have to travel very far anywhere in Canada these days to see towns whose economic and social life-signs are so weak, you practically see ghosts yourself. Ghost Town Anthology merely brings that feeling to life – or death.

Côté has a reputation of being something of a punk filmmaker. But if there is anything transgressive about Ghost Town Anthology it is its optimistic vision, where instead of having characters remain alienated and separated, they come together, find themselves and form a community.

The gradual, matter-of-fact way that Côté transforms Ghost Town Anthology into an actual ghost story is quite impressive.

It could almost be described as a slyly playful, minimalist take on M. Night Shyamalan territory, though that risks making it seem more commercial than it is.

Denis Côté’s eerie fantasy drama juxtaposes the mundane and the parochial with the supernatural, to sometimes disquieting effect.