Rodney Ascher’s Moving Martin Pistorius Doc

Director Rodney Ascher’s obsession with horror and mysterious phenomena takes a tragic real turn in Ghost Boy, which is based on the book of the same title by South African author, speaker and miraculous locked-in syndrome survivor Martin Pistorius.

Pistorius’ harrowing true story may be known to those who have read his autobiography, seen his TEDx Talk or listened to an episode of NPR’s Invisibilia that received some attention back in 2015. But for most of us, including this reviewer, what happens in Ghost Boy is an altogether new and unsettling experience to witness.

It begins when Pistorius is 12 and living a normal suburban life with his parents and siblings in Johannesburg. He has a certain knack for electronics but otherwise seems like your typical good-natured kid. Then one day he gets a sore throat, and from there things spiral downward until he becomes both paralyzed and entirely shut off from the world. He compares the feeling to that of a movie where “someone wakes up a ghost but doesn’t know they have died” — for which Ascher inserts a clip from, well, Ghost.

Applying his usual mix of film excerpts, archive footage and dramatic reenactments — this time shot on a set-exposing soundstage like Lars Von Trier’s Dogville — the director convincingly recreates the sensations the young man felt as his life tumbled into a prolonged abyss. Alongside the succession of images, Ascher interviews Pistorius in the present, using a camera that resembles Errol Morris’ famous Interrotron system. Since his subject is unable to talk, a HAL-like computer voice speaks in his place.

At least half the film deals with the quotidian nightmare that Pistorius’ life became during his teenage years, when he spent his days comatose in a facility where the staff often ignored or mistreated him. And while the boy’s father was altogether loving and attentive to his every need, his mother was so shocked by what happened that she fell into a depression and was unable to care for her son much at all.

The extremely clearheaded way Pistorius describes an experience that, thankfully, almost none of us will ever go through is what lends so much power to Ghost Boy’s narrative. The author has a real knack for words (“among our most powerful tools,” he says) and for transforming complex thoughts and memories into vivid pop culture references.

These include the traumatizing vision of Barney & Friends playing repeatedly at the clinic, which he describes as “monstrous torture.”  Or hearing the Whitney Houston song “Greatest Love of All,” whose lyrics “no matter what they take from me/they can’t take away my dignity” have a particular meaning for someone suffering so much humiliation.

Watching a teenage version of Pistorius (portrayed by Jett Harris in the flashbacks) sitting slumped over like a vegetable as life goes on around him is far from pleasant, nor does Ascher want to make it so. Yet as dark as things get for him, glimmers of hope begin to appear, especially when an attentive nurse starts believing that Pistorius is, in fact, sentient.

From there Ghost Boy gradually transforms into a tale of survival and reconstruction, with Ascher focusing on the methods used to pull Pistorius out of his shell so he could communicate via pictorial cards and, eventually, computers. The older he gets, the better he expresses himself — until we arrive full circle at the sly observations and evocative prose of his book, as well as the life he’s leading at the time the film was shot.

Compared to Ascher’s other films, which blend documentary, movie-like recreations and a certain form of cinematic speculation, what makes Ghost Boy stand apart is that everything in it really happened, even if it appears completely unreal at times. Pistorius spent so many years trapped inside himself that it feels, at least to the viewer, like he was living an out-of-body experience. “The one person I talked to was god,” he says when describing life at its absolute lowest, when he was treated as an “imbecile” by trained professionals.

But the joke is ultimately on them when he emerges as the man he now is, capable of reflecting on horrors that few people will ever know — or ever be able to discuss with such lucidity. “I have come from a terrible darkness,” he concludes, almost with a smile.