Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), a private investigator with a permanent glaze of marijuana and melancholy, opens the door to a ghost—Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), barefoot, brown-skinned, backlit like a memory. She’s his former lover, and she arrives bearing a story soaked in paranoia: her current boyfriend, real estate tycoon Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), may be the target of a plot involving his wife, her sidepiece guru, and the baroque inner workings of Los Angeles capital.

Ryan Gosling’s Lost River is less a film than a haunted tableau — the half-submerged memory of a forgotten VHS found in a house that should have been condemned: frayed, half-erased, pulsing with beauty and dread.