Upending an audience’s expectations has become one of the most joyous experiences to have in a movie theater, especially when so many releases from mainstream studios are content to remain on autopilot. “Mallory’s Ghost,” the first feature co-starring and co-directed by real-life couple Arabella Oz and Nick Canellakis, begins like the sort of film we may have seen before, though is entertaining enough for us not to mind. Oz plays the titular protagonist, who accompanies her boyfriend, Sam (Canellakis), on a writing retreat at a spooky mansion in Maine, where he once went with his ex-girlfriend, Louise (Anjelica Bosboom). It’s not long before Mallory begins having sudden and ominous sightings of Louise. Whether the former flame—who apparently is still very much alive—is indeed haunting the space, or simply the jealous imagination of Mallory, is unclear, though it makes for some enjoyable comedic banter and eerie set pieces.

Then something happens that takes the film in a wholly unexpected and far more provocative direction, one that I wouldn’t dare to spoil. Suffice it to say that “Mallory’s Ghost” offers, in some ways, the therapeutic answer to the juvenile yearnings that fuel Curry Barker’s “Obsession.” I was disarmed by just how thoughtful and touching it proved to be, and by the time its lovely final shot materialized onscreen, I couldn’t wait to discuss the film with the people who made it. Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking via Zoom with Arabella Oz for Cinema Femme about the personal nature of her film, collaborating with her husband and exploring the complex bond forged between women.

I must begin by mentioning a funny coincidence. While researching for this interview, I found that your mother, Lisa Oz, had an acting role in Jennifer Lynch’s “Boxing Helena” as well as served as an executive producer on “From the Head,” the directorial effort of “Twin Peaks” star George Griffith, whom I interviewed about it. 

George is my uncle! 

Oh wow!

[laughs] I was 19 and going to school for film when he offered to let me shadow him on that set in between years of college. I did a lot of standing in for George because he was acting in his own feature, kind of like I did for “Mallory’s Ghost,” and I just learned a lot. They shot it on a set in LA, so watching him direct, work with his cinematographer, and shoot on film provided me with this whole other deep dive into feature filmmaking. It was very much an indie.

I have to say that George really introduced me to a lot of the great masterworks of indie cinema. I was 15 years old when he first showed me the work of directors like John Cassavetes, David Lynch and Antonioni. He would just sit me down and be like, “You have to watch this movie.” Then we’d watch it, and my mind would be expanded. These experiences were very woven into my whole coming of age as a film lover and filmmaker. It was pretty awesome.  

Would you say that your mother also influenced your artistic pursuits?

Yeah, definitely, though a lot of it was subliminal. She never explicitly encouraged me to be a filmmaker. But when I came home every day as a kid, I’d see her working on a script. We had screenwriting books and scripts of other films all over the house. Then when I was seven years old, my mom made her first indie film with her sisters. They shot it in our house, so it was all happening around me. Though my mom ultimately left that world, it was still very much baked into our home and provided me with a kind of framework for making sense of life. At 16, I went to the New York Film Academy, and I remember calling my mom and crying as I said to her, “I don’t have any stories to tell! I don’t feel confident in this.” 

My mom really helped me make sense of what it means to be a storyteller, which I found to often be pretty tortured. It’s such a privilege and so wonderful to be a screenwriter, but centering your voice in that way is also really complicated. On that phone call, she told me about how Sofia Coppola started off in “The Godfather: Part III,” which was considered a failure for her, but then carved this really exceptional path for herself as a filmmaker. Now my mom is getting her PhD in Jungian psychology. She is a big fan of “Mallory’s Ghost” because she’s able to view it through a Jungian lens. She’s a pretty tough critic, so I am grateful that she likes it.

How have you gone about carving out your own identity while having such high-profile parents? 

It’s been a challenge. I’m also a middle child, so I probably have a double whammy in that way. I made the film very much outside of the Hollywood system or any system. I think I had to do that to trick myself into thinking, ‘Well, no one’s going to see this or care about it. It’s just for me and my friends and my collaborators.” Every step of the way, I had to stop myself from thinking about that element of my family. The politics, of course, is much more heated, but even before that, my dad was on TV and had a high profile. I had to force myself to block all of that out of my mind when I’m in my own creative process. Otherwise, I would be paralyzed by thinking about all of the repercussions, the voices and the reactions.

What you’ve created is the sort of film that can connect with anyone regardless of their background. It doesn’t hit you over the head with a message, but rather, gives you a lot to contemplate about human relationships. 

I’m glad that you felt that way about it. That’s probably a product of how personal the project was for me in terms of its story and themes. Working on it enabled me to excavate certain things inside of myself. I definitely wasn’t thinking about what the message was that I wanted to send. It was just a product of my searching for something for myself, and then you always hope that it is going to reach or resonate with anyone who is also engaging in that particular inquiry in their own lives.

I saw that you had a role in “Jigsaw,” and there are some effectively eerie elements early on in “Mallory’s Ghost.” Does the horror genre appeal to you?

I do end up watching a lot of horror, even though I wouldn’t call myself a horror fan. I just find it so entertaining, and there are such incredible artists making horror films right now. But I definitely wasn’t setting out to make even a scary movie, honestly. I wanted to use the genre of thriller or horror to express the dreadful emotional experience of feeling diminished in comparison to another person. I wanted to play with the genre to enforce that sort of emotion, but it wasn’t born out of a fascination with the genre itself. It was more like a tool, which is why as the character stops experiencing that diminishment, the genre kind of melts away too.

Whereas the Mike Flanagan miniseries “The Haunting of Hill House” explored the concept of haunting oneself in a way that is terrifying, your approach to that idea could not be more different tonally.

I only saw the first two episodes of that show. The idea came to me a couple years before I wrote the first draft in 2021. It was very trippy and different from what we ended up shooting, and actually contained a climactic sequence where my character performs a musical number with herself. But that idea was always a part of it, and probably was inspired by the program I was in at the time. I was in my training as a mental health counselor, and was taking a course called Internal Family Systems, which is also called “parts work.” It is all about working with inner struggles, challenges and conflicts by delineating your internal parts. For example, I have a part of me that’s very critical, a part of me that’s lazy, etc. You’re separating and distinguishing each of the parts to see how they all interact, and ultimately so that you can locate the part of you that is the “Self,” with a capital S.

What would it be like to have your life informed by the Self more frequently than the younger, more survival-driven parts? I was in that headspace at the time, and applying those concepts to my own relationship with myself. I had also just entered into a new relationship with Nick, who was my collaborator on the film and now my husband. So these things were all coming to a head—personally, psychologically, and creatively. I found that when you’re digging to the bottom of any pattern, you’ll almost always end up coming back to the Self. That’s the aerial view of how it all happened.

You and Nick have a wonderful comedic chemistry that reminded me of “Manhattan Murder Mystery.”

That’s so funny that you bring up “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” because it’s one of the films that really inspired us! We had been workshopping the script a lot and we would get to a point with certain scenes where we’d be like, “This is such a drag. How do we liven this scene up? How do we make it more fun for us to act in and for us to watch?” We wanted to make something that was full of life, even though it was exploring psychological themes. It was very close to the beginning of the shoot when we watched “Manhattan Murder Mystery” and we both thought the film was so much fun, with its back and forth comedic banter and long handheld oners. 

We ended up shot-listing a bunch of scenes and re-workshopping them based on that energy. Another film that inspired us from around that period was “Alice,” which is metaphysical and ends in a more poignant way, but is also weird and funny. The ghosts aren’t see-through, they’ll just show up and start talking. I just love that era of films that had whimsy and enchantment. I don’t know how to get back there. I don’t know if it was the films themselves, or just how New York City was in the 90s. I also felt that way about the work of Nancy Savoca.

I saw her film “Dogfight” during the pandemic, and it instantly became one of my all-time favorites. 

It might be my favorite film. It’s such a small and simple story, but there’s just something about how it captures the essence of that time and place that appeals to me. I feel the same way about the work of John Patrick Shanley. These were the things that I was pulling from, tonally, because I just wanted to live in that world. 

You really did bring me back to that era, in a way, with your film. I love how subdued and seemingly organic the humor is throughout, such as how you fumble in closing Louise’s eyes with your fingers, all the while having your own eyes closed. Never did I sense you trying to push for a laugh.

Thanks for saying that. Nick and I met in acting class, and we dedicated the film to our teacher, Allen Savage. He would like your comment because that was really what he taught us to do. He wanted everything to organically arise from the truth of the moment, and that’s why he would say that comedy is so hard. The characters and situations all still have to be real. They just happen to be funny and the stakes are different. That was definitely hammered into me and it’s something that I try to do in my work. 

Has this been a big leap for both you and Nick in terms of anchoring a film?

Definitely a big leap for us from what we’ve been doing, but we’ve been doing it for a long time. Nick has made a bunch of short films and a web series that he’s acted in. Over the last couple of years, he’s been making a lot of comedy content on Instagram that has been really gratifying for him. He’s a professional cellist, so he’s found a cool niche in making content for musicians, though I think any creative could relate to a lot of the content he makes. Even though being a cellist is his day job and what he’s been doing since he was seven, he has always loved filmmaking and wanted to make films and be an actor. Nothing either of us have done, however, has been quite this involved. 

The fact he co-edited “Mallory’s Ghost” with you is interesting, since I’ve found that there is something inherently musical about cutting a film. What tone did you want him to strike for the film’s score?

The music was such a journey for us. People have asked whether we had any conflicts while working together onset. I would say that the writing, when we would workshop scenes together, was very fun and alive. Directing onset together was, for me, a necessity. I was so overwhelmed making this film. We shot it in my grandparents’ house, and I just felt an immense amount of pressure every day. I honestly don’t think I could’ve done it without him co-directing it with me. It was great to have someone I could go talk to at the end of the night and be like, “Oh my gosh, I am so scared and so stressed,” rather than have to keep posturing as the director people could rely on. The score was, in fact, the one area that was kind of tricky for us. Nick has been a musician his whole life, and he’s now foraying into composing for film. It was hard for me to articulate what I wanted musically. He would work on a piece for a long time, and once I’d hear it, I’d be like, “That’s not right!” [laughs] 

It’s hard to communicate the tone that you’re looking for in a score. Sometimes you have reference pieces that really help, but you also want it to be its own thing. To be honest, Nick wrote a score that was a lot more classical than I had in mind, but is also a lot more beautiful than I could have envisioned. I suppose the beauty of collaboration is that when you’re not in control, you often get something much better than you had planned for. Now when I watch the film and I listen to his score, I can’t imagine it any other way. His pieces bring such an elegance and a heart to a lot of the film. It really makes many of the emotional scenes what they are. So we got there in the end, though it was a ton of work. He enlisted his musician friends to play the harp, the guitar and the piano. Then he went around with his microphone to their apartments and recorded them. 

Nick and my collaboration is definitely an extension of our relationship. Creating something out of nothing is really hard, and so having each other to lean on, do workshoppings with, or just tell each other that we can do it—or it is real—is something that is essential for us to get things off the ground. Having another person who is doing it with you, keeping you on track, helping you solve problems and navigate the day to day has been so vital. But even when we do things on our own, we will probably always be leaning on each other to bounce ideas back and forth in order to make it better. In our wedding vows, we spoke about how we both wanted the creative foundation of our relationship to be constantly watered and to infuse every other part of our life. 

What qualities were you looking for in the person who would be cast as Louise, and in what ways did Anjelica Bosboom meet or surpass them?

That was definitely a journey too. I was working on the script, and could’ve kept working on it for another ten years. I started looking on Backstage.com for actresses who I thought could play Louise because I figured that if I found her, the film would feel more real, and then the ball would start rolling on making it happen. I probably looked on Backstage for over a year—it’s what I would be scrolling through on my phone rather than Instagram—but never found Louise. Then I reached out to my friend Claire, who’s a documentary producer, and asked if she wanted to produce a narrative feature. She said yes, and that got the ball to start rolling a bit. A few weeks later, I came across Anjelica’s page on Backstage, and something kind of sparked in me. 

I didn’t quite know what I was looking for, but when I saw Anjelica and she sent in her tape, I was immediately struck by how beautiful and composed she was. She has icy blue eyes that made her initially seem unattainable, but as she performed the scene, her very rich vulnerability quickly became apparent as well. There was a duality about her that fit Louise, and I knew I needed to cast someone who the audience could project onto. Usually, you tend to project onto people who are far away, but Louise also happens to be a character who you fall in love with, just as Sam and Mallory do. It’s an interesting thing to straddle, and Anjelica was just so perfect for it. 

The fact that the premise initially seemed reminiscent of Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” made me all the more delighted by how you ultimately explore the relationship between these two women, which does not all hinge on their relationship with Sam. 

I could feel in my own life that any sort of comparison or even competition that I felt or didn’t want to own up to in myself but was there with another woman was like the upper crust of longing. Either it was my expression of a longing for a connection with this woman, or she’s expressing something that I’ve disowned in myself, and I’m sulking about it. [laughs] I could sense that there was love, actually, right behind that competitive feeling. It’s interesting to talk about it now because I don’t feel it so much anymore. I think the film really did kind of alchemize something for me. I’m sure I feel it in other ways, but I did have a pattern in my relationships where I felt this need to compare myself to ex-girlfriends. I knew that if I got to know them, I’d actually just really want to be their friend, and the things that I love about them would also be the things that I’d feel threatened by. We live in a society where people justifiably don’t want to enhance that cattiness between women. It’s so petty and ugly, and we should all be raising each other up.

The truth is that if you have any seeds of inadequacy or insecurity, it’s going to show up in comparison and competition. As you can tell, it’s kind of a tangled ball of wires, which is why the film has so many layers. I just wanted to explore that flavor of love between women where there is also, or had been at some point, a competitiveness. If you can ultimately mature through that process and do the work within yourself to find a sense of wholeness, self-love and self-actualization, then you can just enjoy the love without the shadow side remaining there. The love between Mallory and Louise is so intense, so rich, and in some ways, softer and more complex than Mallory’s love with Sam. It’s a different kind of connection that is very valid in its own way and does not center around Sam. It’s between these two women and illuminates what they’re able to mirror for each other in their own journeys of becoming.

You do sense the characters reaching a new level of maturity and acceptance by the end of the film.

I really wanted that because, for so much of the film, Mallory is in this playroom with toys surrounding her. There is something about her that is not juvenile or stunted, per se, but there is a sense that the wound that she is working through is older than Sam or Louise. There is something kind of young that is needing to grow into a person who is able to hold more information, more truth, more duality, and more of herself. Life is complicated, and I think that it is a process of maturity to be less binary and limited in your worldview. 

I’m sure it’s been hard for distributors to fit this film into an easily marketable box, since it’s difficult to categorize.

You’re right. We had a lot of distributors that wanted to see the film because its title suggests that it falls into the horror genre, which is what’s making a lot of money right now and what distributors are buying. Once they watched it, however, they were like, “Well, it’s not really scary enough for us.” [laughs] It is a genre-bending film, and that can be tricky for people to wrap their heads around in terms of the marketplace. But we took it to SXSW and shared it in Chicago, and I’d say about ten percent of the people who’ve watched it have reached out and said that the film moved them in some way. That has been really powerful and beautiful for us, and it makes all of the work and sacrifice feel justified. It is kind of a quiet film that asks you to sit, take it in and receive it in more of a reflective, receptive state. I know that’s not what everyone is looking for in a film, so I’m happy that some people are perhaps hungry for that type of moviegoing experience right now.

I feel Joe Swanberg must have been the perfect person to have moderated the Q&A for your film when it screened at the Davis Theater in Chicago last month.

We met Joe at SXSW. He was there with his film, “The Sun Never Sets,” which Nick and I had seen before we met him. It was our favorite film at the festival, by far. We were just so in love with it, and I had been a fan of Joe Swanberg’s for a long time, so I was telling Nick about his career and his very unique style of filmmaking. Then we’re at the bar the next day, and I look over and Nick is talking to Joe! I didn’t really say anything since I was a little star-struck. Afterward, Nick came over and was like, “He said we might be able to go to Chicago and he’d screen our film there.” And I was like, “What?!” [laughs] So we sent him the link to our film, and he replied saying, “I’m doing this movie night in Chicago, do you guys want to come?” We were like, “A hundred percent yes!”

Making a film very much outside of the system is one thing. But once you start sharing it with people, you don’t have a choice but to be a part of the system and the market. People, distributors, film festivals and agents are all looking at your film and putting it in a box. You can’t help but feel that you’re in this open water sea of the film industry, and that can be a pretty daunting place—talk about comparison! But then to go to Chicago and do the Q&A with Joe, I realized that we do have a home for this film. It’s a very unique home, but it’s a real place with a real audience, and it inspires the type of conversations that Joe really fosters. We had a 45-minute Q&A after the screening that was so personal and intimate. It left us feeling very hopeful and encouraged. 

During the Q&A for “The Sun Never Sets” at the Chicago Critics Film Festival last month, Joe spoke candidly about how his film sprang organically from his own experiences.

What he does may not seem hard for him to do, but it is. It’s so vulnerable and very generous, actually, to share your inner workings like that for the world to then use as a mirror.

Horror is easy to market at a time where the news itself resembles a horror film, yet movies like “Mallory’s Ghost” encourage us to slow down and really listen to each other.

Part of the beauty of the time that we are living in is that you can put a movie out there yourself and you can find an audience for it if you put the work in. I hope that this film has a slow burn life over time and will connect with the people who are looking for something like it. The film was made with the intention of offering a certain path toward healing through self-responsibility, self-reclamation, or centering a type of life that is inspired, inspiring and beautiful. I have this personal philosophy that a film is a living thing. You put so much of yourself into it, as do all of the people who help you make it. You can’t have a thing absorb that much human energy without it then taking on a life of its own. I want the things that we are Frankenstein-ing into life to offer something net-positive in the world.

Has this experience made you eager to continue working both in front of and behind the camera?

Yes, though there was a period after the premiere where I was a little shell-shocked. We had just climbed a mountain and then I found myself back at the bottom of a new mountain. But now, things are starting to wake up again. Nick and I are actually working on another script together that we want to co-direct and co-star in. The film is leaning much more towards comedy, but it’ll still have something to say. It’s about the classical music world and the midlife slump one has as a creative and how to navigate that. It also has some thriller, horror, cult-y elements too that will be fun. At the same time, I’m working on something on my own that I really don’t want to act in. I’m actually really excited to have the experience of directing other actors without being a part of the cast myself. I just want to see what I can do when I’m wearing only one hat.

“Mallory’s Ghost” will screen on Thursday, June 11th, & Saturday, June 13th, at the deadCenter Film Festival in Oklahoma City; on Friday, July 17th, & Saturday, July 18th, at the Maine International Film Festival; and on Sunday, July 26th, at the Woods Hole Film Festival in Massachusetts.