Tropic Sprockets / Personal Shopper

By Ian Brockway

The provocative Oliver Assayas directs a thoughtful journey into what may or may not be the supernatural. This is a stark and somewhat minimalist story about a woman haunted by her late brother. The film “Personal Shopper” is as bare as its title but within its insular perspective, it represents a complete realm that fully portrays a character in crisis.

Maureen (Kristen Stewart) is a young person with supposed psychic abilities, living in Paris. She works as a shopper to a famous pop star named Kyra (Nora von Waldstätten). Maureen has gone to Paris hoping to detect traces of her brother Lewis, who died in Paris due to a heart ailment, which they both share.

Day after day, she ventures in luxury store after luxury store. But her mind is not on buying. Maureen is obsessed with Lewis and psychic phenomena. She goes to the damp compound where Lewis lived as a medium and begs for a sign of his presence.

Nothing comes that convinces her.

She seeks solace from Lewis’s girlfriend Lara (Segrid Bouazis) who grimly acknowledges her feeling, but then says that she rather not dwell on Lewis. Maureen again returns to the house and sees an angry apparition that vomits upon her.

But did she really see it?

On a train to London, Maureen receives semi threatening text messages from an unknown person. She goes shopping for clothes, stops at Kyra’s house and tries on her expensive dresses. Abruptly she becomes sexually aroused. During the day, however, Maureen is pale and listless. Maureen’s boyfriend Gary (Ty Olwin) is anemic as well and has little to say on the subject of the paranormal.

After a few days, Maureen returns to Kyra’s spacious apartment, only to find a slain and bloody fresh corpse accompanied by strange lights and knockings right out of a poltergeist tale. The text messages persist with Maureen becoming weirdly both indifferent and frightened.

The film raises questions as to just what is actually happening. Are the events a projection of Maureen’s thoughts or guilt? Why does she react so plainly to Kyra’s laconic boyfriend (Anders Danielsen Lie) and to the police?

This is billed as a ghost story and a ghost is indeed present, but the real ghost is Maureen herself, whose emotions are abstract and hard to measure. Perhaps Maureen is not reliable at all. In tone and feeling “Personal Shopper” is reminiscent of Roman Polanski’s “The Tenant.” Scenes are shown and it is up to the audience to pick up the pieces. Laconic yet beautifully filmed, this is an Existential haunted house (or haunted hotel) story and it is sure to polarize.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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