WHEN you go to a film festival, cramming down four movies a day can make it easier to spot patterns than it is when you watch at a more leisurely pace. Starting with the most unexpected: a fifth of the films I saw in Toronto International Film Festival featured some sort of apparition, often manifested by characters dealing with extreme stresses in their lives. It is a slightly hokey film-making technique, used to varying effect.

Both good and bad mothers come back to haunt daughters who are trying to inhabit their legacies.

Maps to the Stars follows aging movie star Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore, in an unhinged performance) as she tries to win a part in a remake of her late (and abusive) mother Clarice’s (Sarah Gadon) most famous film.

Havana’s pursuit of the role her mother once inhabited initially seems charming. “That would be so amazing for you to play your own mother,” Carrie Fisher (playing herself) tells Havana when they run into each other. “Every woman should have that opportunity.” But it spirals into a loony obsession, with Havana pitching herself in the middle of a threesome and celebrating when a tragic accident makes her a frontrunner for the part.

What those around her cannot know is that Havana is having visions of Clarice. For Havana, winning the role is a chance to displace her mother both in her memory and in the public eye. She hopes she can literally rewrite movie history.

Unlike Havana, Cheryl (Reese Witherspoon), the main character in Wild, is desperately trying to keep her mother’s (Laura Dern) memory alive.

In this adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir of the same name, which chronicles the author’s walk along the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl is devastated when her mother is diagnosed with and quickly succumbs to cancer. After scattering most of the older woman’s ashes, Cheryl eats some of them and begins to see fleeting appearances of her mother during an adulterous liaison in an alley and at a moment of grief on the trail. As ghostly manifestations go, Cheryl’s mother is relatively quiet: a look from her is enough for Cheryl to know if she is living up to or failing to meet her mother’s high standards.

We get a spunkier ghost in Cake, in the form of Nina (Anna Kendrick), a chronic pain sufferer whose dramatic suicide deeply affects Claire (Jennifer Aniston), a member of Nina’s former support group. As Claire contemplates rebuilding her life, which was shattered along with her body in a terrible accident, Nina keeps appearing to needle her, displaying some of the crotchety, acid humor that Claire herself often uses to protect herself.

“Why don’t you just do it?” Nina demands of Claire, suggesting she commit suicide, too. “Don’t be such a coward.” But the ghost eventually softens to the living woman. Nina ends up giving Claire what she did not know she needed: ideas that help Claire reach out to Nina’s grieving husband and son.

All of these ghosts have more energy and power than the one who shows up periodically in Black and White, Mike Binder’s truly terrible movie about a custody fight between the Caucasian and African-American grandparents of a biracial little girl.

Kevin Costner plays Elliot Anderson, a mild alcoholic lawyer whose wife (Jennifer Ehle) is killed by a drunk driver in the movie’s opening scene. Thereafter, she appears to him in moments of distress, always silent, always with the same beatific smile. The ghost is part of a more general tendency in Black and White to affirm everything Elliot does while confirming his every stereotypical assumption about the other branch of his granddaughter’s family.

All of these fictional encounters between the living and the dead pale before a factual one, though. In The Look of Silence released as a follow-up to Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary about the Indonesian genocide of 1965, Adi, a young Indonesian man, seeks out the men who killed his older brother Ramli in the spasm of violence that was ostensibly aimed at Communists.

I have some ethical qualms about The Look of Silence, which seems to expose Adi and his family to retribution from members of Indonesia’s dictatorship who still hold power, and spends a gratuitous amount of time photographing Adi’s disabled father in scenes that have no connection to the narrative. But there is no denying the power of Adi’s confrontations with the people who executed his brother. It is shocking to watch one family make a desperate bid to smooth over this scar in their shared history, asking that Adi treat them as his relatives (and by implication, not to hold onto a vendetta against them).

There will be plenty of ghosts on screen this fall and next spring. The Look of Silence cautions us and other film-makers that sometimes the living can haunt the living even more effectively than the dead.

—By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, September 19th, 2014