Three recent movies in different genres have had one thing in common — fathers who interact with the ghosts of their dead daughters. In the historical drama “Creation,” Charles Darwin sees the ghost of his daughter as his struggle to deal with her loss reflects in part his struggle over whether to publish his controversial theory of evolution. In the literary adaptation “The Lovely Bones,” the spirit of a murdered girl is stuck in the “in between” as she tries to help her devastated family and expose the killer. And in the thriller “Edge of Darkness,” Mel Gibson plays a cop whose 24-year-old daughter is murdered. As he seeks to understand what she was involved in, he sees her ghost as both a child and an adult, with an especially sweet scene with her at about age five helping him shave.
I always wonder, when something like this happens, whether it is some sort of harmonic convergence or just a coincidence.