User reviews

The fear and disbelief in the voices of "Mark's" group of friends, is heartbreaking. A man who clearly did not fit in, ran off to the worst possible location on the planet, just to be part of something bigger. Yet, his friends still have hope, telling themselves he might not be the person they think he was all along. To live in the unknown, trying to protect your loved ones from radicalism, brought upon you by a loved one must be a constant battle with yourself and a country that doesn't want to educate itself to move forward. Short, relevant and dismal.

This documentary was a good view of what it's like to be a young Muslim in USA after 9/11. Also, the heartbreaking feelings behind "Mark´s" friends masks fill all documentary scenario. However, the documentary has very few substance/information. Indeed, it explains almost nothing about why "Mark" became extremist and why his friends thought he was an FBI spy.

I enjoyed this very short documentary despite the fact that it had no apparent structure or objective. I think it missed a great opportunity to explain in depth why his closest friends think this man radicalised,how it impacted their lives and how they think it could have been avoided.

Zero point to this "documentary". No information about what he did or what he was saying he believed in.. why would you end it like that? The whole thing was pointless speculation and it ended with one fact that should've been elaborated on and would've made it good. Totally pointless. Really irritating. I was very interested in knowing what happened.

The subject of this documentary and the fact it is apparently a sundance winner gave me so much hope for it, but to no avail. This ridiculously short documentary has no substance and explains nothing as to why this man became an extremist, and nothing as to his life as an extremist, It also does not even vaguely explain why so many of his friends thought he was an FBI informant, which could alone make an amazing documentary due to the extreme tactics the FBI use to create informants to exploit non-extreme muslims. to say I was disappointed is an understatement, part of me feels like the only reason this has any critical acclaim is because of the fact that everyone interviewed is in a comical/sinister mask, suggesting they are actually divulging sensitive information, which they arent. Poor, poor documentary, I wouldnt even bother.

Most of the reviewers who left negative reviews did so because they expected this to be a documentary that vilifies Mark and provides all the saucy and morbid details of everything that they assume he's done. But this documentary is not about that. This documentary is about the hurt that he caused in a community that is already heavily targeted, and how his friends are coping and trying to understand his actions. It touches on how a fairly normal kid can go rogue given the right circumstances and it humanises that fact. After reading some of the reviews it seems that a lot of people are not interested in knowing how terrorism affects Muslim communities in the US, but I found it a very touching and raw account from a perspective we don't often see.

"Suburban Muslims have to learn to live with the consequences of a close friend's actions." That's the official synopsis, yet the documentary is purely just a pointless discussion among uninformed individuals speculating what happened of the 'close friend', without even exploring anything substantial.

The only thing interesting about this documentary is that the interviewees wear superhero masks - supposedly to 'protect' themselves. That too is rendered pointless as it's not like these people are divulging any sensitive information that would affect themselves negatively. Plus, the ill-fit masks are poor disguises and ultimately ineffective without any voice-modulation.

The whole mask thing just seems like a gimmick to incite our inherent excitement and intrigue of controversial topics.

The documentary fails to inform us audiences about what really happened (how and why the friend became involved with ISIS and its extremism), and the whole topic is guided by the interviewed subjects who themselves are very uninformed and are pointlessly speculating about the friend and his fate.

The filmmakers glossed over several aspects and information that would've made this documentary more interesting, especially about the involvement of FBI informants in American Muslim societies and the possibility of the friend being an informant himself.

How this ended up being a winner at Sundance, I have no idea. At the end, this uninformed documentary doesn't attempt to look deeper into the truth or reveal anything pertaining to case. Neither does it really show how the Muslim Americans are affected by the incident discussed. It'll just make you scratch your head at what the point watching this incredibly short documentary was.

I really wanted to give this documentary a shot because I live in Houston, but I was thoroughly disappointed. The documentary was completely slanted in one way and assumes that every comment and interview was truthful. Sugar Land is one of the most diverse cities in the Houston surrounding area, and It's sad to see such a bad misrepresentation of this area.

Seriously just one of the worst documentaries I've ever watched. The boys seemed very immature so that made it very annoying to even listen to them talk. They also just seemed like they wanted attention and weren't even very educated about their own religion. I get the message and the point that was supposed to be portrayed, but it was every lacking in detail/info. Just a waste of 21 min of my life.

Not to sound condescending, but I think those who are criticizing this as "pointless" or "vague" are missing its purpose. This is not a documentary about the radicalization of the individual, it is about the personal toll his actions took on his group of friends, the ghost that his actions left behind (thus the title.) I do agree that the choice to provide little to no information about "Mark's" actual actions is a little confusing as a viewer, but on the other side of that, I think it lends an interesting mysterious tone to the whole thing, and makes it all the more powerful when the filmmakers do decide to elaborate more on "Mark". This story has been reported plenty online, so if you are looking for information on "Mark", I would google it, but if you take this documentary for what it is, a very micro-personal look at a group of Muslim American men, I think it is a really intriguing short watch.

Boring, no substance, stupid masks and it's 21 minutes of my life I'll never get back. An abysmal documentary.

A group of suburban Muslims discuss how their friend got interested in Islamic practices and what led him to convert to Islam.

Ghost of Sugar Land is a short documentary film that was interesting but too brief. The concept of the short documentary would have been executed perfectly if they questioned the group as to why they believe their friend is an FBI informant and give detail on that subject.

Ghost of Sugar Land is a short documentary that was poorly done. A meaningless film that could have been a captivating watch.

The documentary gives the city name on the title, a lot of photos with only the supposed radicalized guy's face and after calling him by a pseudominum the entire movie it gives his real name at the end. Why exactly did all his friends wear masks? It's not hard to find who they are. There's a thing called Google, you know. Also, the guy being interwied in the middle of a store with people walking around? All the secrecy is GONE.

We don't actually know anything about this guy's beliefs, what he tries to make his friends do. I understant not wanting to show radicalization, but it's the entire point of the movie, it just doesn't work without showing it. The question as if he is a FBI informant of not is an empty one without context. They talk about Houston but never explain the a case of a radicalized guy who wanted to go joy ISIS and talked about it to a FBI informant and got arrested. I just gave you more information than the movie did. You are welcome.

A big waste of my time.

A pathetic attempt at a documentary with no point at all. Cant believe Netflix even listed this.

This 21 min documentary has no story, just the random musings of some illiterate people (who say "mom and dad IS" over and over again). Apparently, an American-born friend of theirs called "Mark" (an alias) converted to Islam, and went to Syria. No idea on who this Mark is, or why he would convert to Islam. What do "Mark's parents think about his conversion?

There are no answers to anything, but the audience won't care because the few characters are masked, and the main character, "Mark", is unknown and not much is revealed about him to make us care about what happened to him.

A complete waste of time!

The doc is presented from the VERY limited perspective of westernized middle eastern young Muslim adults. I've lived in Houston all my life and there is a very large Nigerian -Muslim community as well as large Black American Muslim community. He was "the black Muslim" comment solidified the subjects ignorance when it came to the overwhelming ethnic diversity of their own religion, within their own city. Instead of pointing out and directly their "friend" to the many diverse or predominantly black Muslim masjids where he could find community and knowledgeable leaders, they ostracized him. And every during the doc continue to speculate about his involvement with the FBI and his whereabouts. It was like listening in on a group of ignorant individuals gossip about a man they were never genuinely friends with. The masks are also idiotic as we know who "mark" really is and all of the censored photos are wildly available on google. As a viewer, it didn't seem like the masks were used to distance themselves from being associated with Mark. It seemed like they were distancing themselves from having provide meaningful insight as to how the true nature of Islam is meant to be practiced compared with how extremism has facilitated a horrifically warped version of the religion. The doc had no substance and the individuals came off as ignorant and immature.

What did I just watch? Was expecting something interesting and like others have said, it has no substance. Fortunately I only lost 22 minutes.

Seriously, don't bother. It's 21 minutes of a group of guys talking about their friend who converted to Islam and may or may not have become radicalized. Oh, and they wear movie/tv character masks while doing so. No background info on the history of Islam or it's preachings, no background info on the subject in question. The "documentary" (if you want to call it that) is like the equivalent to going to a restaurant, sitting next to a group of people and listening to them talk about a friend of theirs without knowing any history or backstory about that friend and the subject matter.

This is a pretty cheap and baffling documentary. It seems as though the documentarian saw that there was a glimmer of something interesting, threw together a few quick shooting sessions, and then wrapped right before anything interesting happened.

What is this about? Is it about Muslim Americans in the suburban south grappling with prejudice after 9/11? If so, there's really no insight beyond what every American would've already known some 17+ years ago. The 10ish middle aged male interview subjects, who all have their faces masked for reasons that are never really clear, don't really dig deep into their personal experiences or share anything especially reflective or intimate. It's hard to empathize with a mask--harder still when the voice coming from behind the mask is saying fairly surface-level, gossipy things? If this is a movie about how Muslims of Middle Eastern and Asian descent experience life in America, then the revelations are pretty dull.

This movie could have been an examination of Sugar Land, Texas. The title suggests that the locale bears some importance, but the film fails to deliver. We learn that Sugar Land is very diverse in every aspect except for African Americans, and we see yearbook pages full of teenagers of European, East Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern descent along with a solitary young black man, who is the center of the film's focus. What are the historical roots of that demographic diversity? How does that play out in the local culture? The film provides no historical context, no maps or statistics, no local news clips, no interviews with city government officials or business owners or law enforcement. I imagine that any of these things could have illuminated exactly what this part of the country is like... but no.

So I suppose what this movie is really about is a young black man who became radicalized by a combination of toxic internet discourse and not having any place to belong in his community. The movie begins by developing a pseudonym for this central character, yet he's the only person whose face isn't blurred out of the photographs. The text at the end reveals why that's so, but that text also suggests that we could have been watching a different, much more interesting film all this time. Instead of baseless conjecture and the gossipy accusations of anonymous social media friends, we could have been exploring the actual history of this man. Perhaps we could have heard from his family, from other black people in the community... something. That would've been more interesting than what this film is.

I'm willing to concede that maybe the point is to reveal something hypocritical about the masked interview subjects--that we're supposed to find ourselves identifying not with them but with the mysterious man at the center, who's given a face and a name but no actual voice. But if that's the point, then the film tries too hard and succeeds at very little.

While it lacked many details, it was interesting to see how it was directed to focus more on the personal affects of radicalisation on a group of friends. Despite the serious subject, getting the interviewees to wear fictitious character masks took further from the severity of the topic - which seemed to be done intentionally. Not sure why.