Summary
A personal shopper for a celebrity living in Paris refuses to leave the city until she makes contact with her twin brother who died there. When a stranger starts sending her texts, things get even more complicated.
My Thoughts
This isn’t an easy movie to classify in terms of genre. On one hand, it’s a supernatural thriller with dashes of horror, and on the other hand, it’s a slow burn genre about recovering from the loss of a loved one. It’s a decent film with beautiful cinematography, an interesting script, and a unique way of looking at the spirit realm/ ghosts, and for those reasons alone, I believe it’s worth checking out. This movie is not without its fault, however.
(SOME SPOILERS IN THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH)
Maureen (Kristen Stewart, “Still Alice”) is a personal shopper for Kyra (Nora von Waldstatten), a celebrity living in Paris. During her free time, Maureen tries to make contact with her late twin brother, Lewis. When she stays in her brother’s home, she starts to hear and see things that hint at the existence of a spirit world, but Maureen needs more proof in order to move on. Things get more complicated when Maureen begins receiving text messages from an unknown number, pushing her to do things she wouldn’t normally do.
(SPOILERS END)
I feel like Kristen Stewart gets a bad rap. Yes, she’s most famous for the Twilight series, which is abysmal. That was mostly at the fault of the source material. When she’s given a good script, she’s proved she can seriously act. This is one of her better performances; she’s melancholy, irritated and seductive all at the same time. She’s incredibly vulnerable in this role, and it works incredibly well for her. I know she and Assayas worked together previously on “The Clouds of Sils Maria”, and for her performance in that, she walked off with the Cesar Award for Best Supporting Actress. I have yet to see that film, but after seeing this, I’m sure I’ll see it soon.
The directing is something that brought me to this film originally. Last year, I watched the theatrical cut of Assayas’s “Carlos” (2010) and found that captivating and exhilarating, and I looked forward to seeing more of his work. Assayas has a way of making things interesting, especially when there is very little going on. This film is a perfect example of his talents, because he’s able to craft very different atmospheres in a relatively short amount of time. He also provides a few shocking moments, and some of the coolest ghost imagery I’ve ever seen on screen. One of my favorite scenes in this whole movie is when Maureen first starts to get the text messages from the stranger. The texts are an on-again-off-again conversation, following Maureen throughout her entire day. This scene is great because not only is it building tension as the text messages become stranger, but it also gives us a great inside view into Maureen’s life, and why she doesn’t particularly care for her job.
My biggest issue with this movie is some stilted dialogue throughout. I realize Assayas is a French director, and English is his second language, so I try to give foreign directors doing English films the benefit of the doubt most of the time. There weren’t any truly awful lines, but there were some that felt very strange, and others that were rather on the nose. Another small issue is the pacing near the middle of the film. There are a few scenes in a row that really felt slow for me, and I was tempted to pause and get up and do other things for a while.
Verdict
Overall, this is a well-crafted movie, but it’s a hard one to recommend to many people solely because it defies genre. It’s not a horror movie though it contains elements of horror. It’s more of a drama, but there are elements that could be a little startling. It could be a thriller, but it doesn’t seem tense enough during the middle. For the right person, I think this movie could really speak to them. For me, it mostly worked.
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