Things have been quiet here lately, because life has been happening elsewhere — work, writing, the slow accumulation of days that ask for attention before reflection. Everything Haunted is still very much alive, though, and this felt like a good place to begin again.

When people talk about ghost stories, Anthony Minghella’s Truly, Madly, Deeply doesn’t always come up. The third film on my dissertation list is often filed away as a romantic and unusual watch on a rainy afternoon. But at its heart, it’s one of the most honest films about grief I know, and one of the most understatedly radical ghost stories on screen.

The premise is deceptively simple. Nina loses Jamie, the man she loves, and is left alone with her grief. And then, impossibly, he comes back. Not as a frightening presence or a vengeful spirit, but as himself: affectionate, familiar, irritating, loving. The ghost here doesn’t tear Nina’s world apart — he steps back into it.

What Truly, Madly, Deeply understands, and what makes it so refreshing, is that grief isn’t tidy. It doesn’t move in straight lines or reach neat conclusions. Nina doesn’t “get over” Jamie, and the film never asks her to. Instead, it shows grief as something lived alongside daily routines: work, friendships, music, washing up. Loss doesn’t arrive with thunder or spectacle — it settles in quietly and refuses to leave.

Jamie’s return makes visible something many people experience but rarely see reflected on screen: the ongoing and real relationship with the dead. Grief isn’t just about absence. It’s about presence too. It’s about memories, habits, imagined conversations, the feeling that someone is still with you in ways that are hard to explain. Jamie’s ghost externalises that feeling. He is, in many ways, Nina’s grief given a body and a voice.

What’s especially striking is that the film doesn’t present this as unhealthy or delusional. Nina’s attachment to Jamie isn’t pathologised. The ghost isn’t there to be exorcised. Instead, his presence allows her to stay connected for long enough to realise that connection doesn’t have to mean stasis. Love doesn’t have to be erased just because life has to continue.

There’s something deeply honest in how the film lets this play out. Jamie’s return is comforting (at first). He fills the flat with music, jokes, warmth. But slowly, gently, it becomes clear that staying with the dead means not fully living among the living. This isn’t framed as a failure on Nina’s part. It’s simply the emotional reality of grief: holding on can feel safer than moving forward, even when moving forward doesn’t mean forgetting.

Unlike so many ghost stories, Truly, Madly, Deeply isn’t interested in fear or punishment. Its haunting is domestic, intimate, even mundane. The flat becomes a shared space between past and present. The supernatural slips easily into the rhythms of ordinary life. In doing so, the film suggests that ghosts don’t always arrive to terrify us. Sometimes ghosts stay with us simply because we need them to.

What makes the film endure is its refusal to offer easy closure. Jamie doesn’t vanish because Nina has learned a lesson or reached some final emotional milestone. His departure feels less like an ending and more like a shift. The bond changes, but it isn’t erased. Grief doesn’t disappear — it becomes livable.

In that sense, Truly, Madly, Deeply offers a quietly hopeful vision of haunting. It treats grief not as something to conquer, but as something that can be integrated into a life still worth living. It allows space for love to persist without demanding that it dominate forever. It’s a ghost story that understands what so many others miss: that sometimes the most frightening thing about loss isn’t that the dead might return — it’s the idea that they might not.