Olivier Assayas sets a ghost story among garment bags and courier runs, and its most frightening scenes are text messages on a train. Kristen Stewart carries it almost alone. The second half loses its grip in places, and the ending will send some out muttering.
Olivier Assayas has made a ghost story and set it in the back rooms of Paris fashion houses. Maureen Cartwright (Kristen Stewart) spends her days on a scooter collecting dresses and jewellery for Kyra Gellman (Nora Waldstätten), a woman too famous to shop for herself, and her nights in an empty house waiting for her dead twin brother to knock. She is a medium, and the two of them agreed that whoever died first would send the other a sign. Personal Shopper is Assayas’s second film with Stewart after Clouds of Sils Maria (2014). It is the stranger of the two, it is good, and in two long stretches it frightened us more than most horror films manage.
The house comes first. François-Renaud Labarthe gives it bare walls, a staircase and too many doors, and Yorick Le Saux lights the night scenes with what appears to be the glow from the street and nothing else. Maureen walks the rooms with a hand on the banister and says nothing. A tap runs. Something upstairs shifts. Assayas is not coy: when he decides to show a ghost he shows one, an old-fashioned one, and has it off the screen before we can object. We were frightened, plainly, and by almost nothing.
The day job is treated as seriously as the haunting. Maureen queues at a Chanel press office, signs for garment bags, and is not permitted to try any of it on. Jürgen Doering keeps her in the same jumper and jeans, so the dresses she carries look made for a different sort of person. Waldstätten has two scenes and makes Kyra loathsome without raising her voice. Lars Eidinger’s Ingo, Kyra’s lover, talks to Maureen the way people talk to staff when they want something, and Eidinger lets us see him enjoying it.
The centrepiece is a train to London. Maureen’s phone lights up with a message from a number she does not know, and the stranger knows things about her. Assayas holds on the screen, on the three dots that mean someone is typing, and Marion Monnier cuts between the phone and Stewart’s face and almost nothing else for what felt like a quarter of an hour. Few horror films with ten times as much in them have gripped us as hard. It is that Maureen answers, and we could see her deciding to, and we wanted to lean across the aisle and take the phone away.
Stewart is on screen alone for most of the 106 minutes and carries it. She fidgets, chews a sleeve, says “I don’t know” a great deal, and gives Maureen a grief that has settled into bad posture rather than tears. There is a scene in which she puts on something she was told not to, with nobody watching, and it is the saddest thing in the film. Ty Olwin’s Gary, her boyfriend, is a face on a laptop who exists so she has someone to say things aloud to; Sigrid Bouaziz’s Lara and Anders Danielsen Lie’s Erwin get one good scene at a kitchen table and are then forgotten.
Around the hour mark the second half turns towards a crime story, which we will not describe, and Assayas handles that material with markedly less confidence than the haunting. A police interview (Hammou Graïa is the officer) is played flat when it needs pressure, and a long walk down a hotel corridor waits for a payoff we suspect only Assayas can see. A television programme about Victor Hugo’s séances, with Benjamin Biolay as Hugo, plays like the film handing over its reading list. No single composer is credited; the music is a few songs and long silences, and that suits it.
The people around us divided on the way out. We came down on the film’s side because the two things it does best, the house and the train, are done better than almost anyone else is doing them. It carries a 15 certificate and opened in UK cinemas on 17 March 2017. Watch it at home, alone, with your own phone face down on the table.
