Personal Shopper
Director: Oliver Assayas
Talent: Kristen Stewart, Lars Eidinger, Sigrid Bouaziz, Anders Danielsen Lie
Release Date: 17th March
In this deeply unconventional psychological thriller which reunites her with Olivier Assayas, her director in Clouds of Sils Maria, Kristen Stewart plays Maureen, a young American woman living in Paris who can speak with ghosts. Her brother has recently died from the same heart condition she’s been diagnosed with, and Maureen is waiting for a sign that he has made it to the other side. Most of her nights are spent attempting to make contact with him in their eerie, now vacant childhood home, while during the day she zips around the city in her capacity as personal shopper for a spoiled celebrity.
Though she casually refers to herself as a medium and is shown on more than one occasion watching documentaries about 19th Century spiritualists almost as how-to manuals, Maureen is very much a product of her time and thus completely devoted to her smartphone. On a train journey to London, she receives a series of increasingly disturbing anonymous text messages of a possibly supernatural origin; this long sequence could’ve been a mess or just plain boring in the wrong hands, but Assayas imbues it with a palpable sense of dread, making it feel like a physical invasion. Maureen’s haunted house just happens to fit in her pocket.
Unfortunately, the film stumbles when depicting more traditional scares—one particularly ill-advised special effects sequence wouldn’t have been out of place in the last Ghostbusters—but Stewart never puts a foot wrong. In recent years, she has been quietly putting together a catalogue of strong supporting performances, but here she proves to be absolutely magnetic in a central role. There isn’t an abundance of dialogue for her to work with, so she builds her character mainly through body language, conveying her grief, fear and spiritual exhaustion, as well as her steely inner core and startling sensuality. She anchors even the most outlandish plot elements firmly in reality, and the film simply wouldn’t work without her.
Mysterious and compelling.
Words – Felipe Deakin
