Directed by: Olivier Assayas
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Lars Eidinger, Sigrid Bouaziz
Rated R, 105 minutes
Satisfying ghost stories are immensely difficult to write. Once the ghosts have jumped out and the startle has passed, a question arises: So what? If the story’s whole purpose is to spook its listener, that question can go unanswered; that’s how we get generic horror flicks. In “Personal Shopper,” writer-director Olivier Assayas (“Clouds of Sils Maria”) challenges himself to impart deeper meaning to ghost stories, suggesting that ghosts are reflections more of the people who see them than of dead souls. The result is often self-defeating and vague, but nevertheless engrossing.
The film follows Maureen (Kristen Stewart, “Twilight”), a medium mourning the death of her fellow medium and twin brother, Lewis. By day she works as a personal shopper, going from gallery to gallery in Paris buying clothes and accessories for her high-profile boss. It’s not meaningful work, but it allows her to stay in Paris, where she’s waiting for her brother to send her a sign from the afterlife. Between nights spent in Lewis’s old house listening for his ghost, she lives passively, video chatting with her boyfriend, working out the sale of the house with Lewis’s girlfriend, Lara (Sigrid Bouaziz, “Nazar Palmus”), and interacting with her never-present boss through notes. The most meaningful connection she has with anyone is a brief encounter with her boss’s lover, Ingo (Lars Eidinger, “Clouds of Sils Maria”), who takes a polite interest in Maureen’s situation. As the months pass and the waiting game takes its toll on Maureen, she begins to doubt herself. But then she starts receiving text messages from a seemingly omniscient stranger, setting in motion a series of unsettling events that leaves Maureen rattled and uncertain about her life.
Where this movie thrives is in its depictions of ghosts. Assayas treats the supernatural with patience, allowing his ghosts to truly get under our skin. One of the final scenes of the movie features an apparition that does nothing more than move from one side of the screen to the other in the background, but it is easily the most unnerving moment in the entire film; in other scenes, ghosts announce their presence with clattering pipes and distant footsteps, but remain unseen. Smoky visual effects obscure ghosts when they do appear, while eclectic music and sounds often come in or go away to intensify the terror of the moment. When Assayas chooses to indulge his horror movie instincts, it is impossible to look away.
These moments are also where Kristen Stewart shines. Stewart immerses herself in Maureen’s traumas and fears, striking a remarkable balance between nervousness and confrontation. Unfortunately, in many scenes of Maureen’s everyday life, Stewart resorts to the limp shrugging and noncommittal mumbling that earned her a reputation as a lesser actress. In fairness to Stewart, she’s hardly the only actor here guilty of excessive understatement; Assayas guided all his actors into underwhelming performances, to say nothing of the parts he wrote for them, which are somehow both ambiguous and overly expository.
The film as a whole suffers from Assayas’ inconsistent script and uneven directing. Scenes get cut off with clumsy fade-outs; character decisions sometimes make no sense; the text messages, central to the story’s development, often lapse into vague platitudes and riddles that keep us at arm’s length for no reason other than that perhaps the movie would have been too short otherwise. It’s clear that Assayas has two stories working in tandem—one of Maureen’s connection with the dead, and one of her connection with herself—but he struggles to link them in a natural way, leaving us with a film with noticeably disparate parts and a heavy reliance on the viewer to interpret what Assayas could not translate onto the screen.
The great success of “Personal Shopper” is that, despite its fundamental flaws, it remains a rewarding film to see, one that still manages to leave the viewer with meaningful food for thought. Assayas sees the human obsession with the afterlife as a complement to our inability to predict the desires of another person, much less to guess our own. And left unexamined, desire easily turns into fear. While ghosts may make searing impressions and linger on as terrifying afterimages, they are no more debilitating than any other kind of fear.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 3/31/17.