Clouds of Sils Maria director Olivier Assayas teams up once again with Kristen Stewart for this intermittently tense but frustratingly illusive psychological thriller that mingles in both the very tangible world of high fashion and the equally intangible spirit realm. Personal Shopper is quite the blend of genres — part ghost story, part soul-searching drama, part murder mystery — and Assayas almost manages to pull the concoction off. Unfortunately, the ethereal side of the storytelling offers more tantalizing questions than satisfying answers and doesn’t provide the kind of closure that both the main character and the audience seek.
Stewart plays Maureen Cartwright, a lonely young woman who lives in Paris and travels around Europe buying clothes for wealthy supermodels who don’t have the time or inclination to shop for themselves. We find out that Maureen is also grieving the recent death of her twin brother Lewis and, based on a pact they formed before his passing, is using her abilities as a medium to make a connection with him from beyond the grave. While on a business trip, she receives a string of ominous text messages from an unknown number that suggest a sort of otherworldly omnipotence which indicate they could either be from Lewis or a more malevolent force.
Assayas is able to manufacture tension just from the sheer peculiarity of the narrative alone and from the unconventional shifts in tone that may throw some for a loop but may actually be the film’s biggest asset. The sequence in which Maureen initially spars with her mysterious texter during a train ride to London is gripping and insidiously patient as it unfolds in what feels like real time, with the infuriating bouncy ellipses and all. The creepy haunted house scenes like the one that opens the film have an eerie unpredictability to them and actually tend to be spookier than the jump scares of full-blown horror movies.
If the thriller-based sequences make for the most effective portions of the film, then it’s the drawn-out musings on the afterlife and the relationship between the living and the dead that ultimately bring it down. When the mystery plot wraps up, we’re treated to one conversation after another that essentially hits the same beats about the nature of spirit world and doesn’t add to a greater understanding of the characters. It’s as if Assayas had an hour and twenty minutes of a decent movie together and he decided to go on auto-pilot for the final twenty minutes and hoped that the audience either wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care.
Even in the film’s most dubious of choices, Kristen Stewart does her best to pull it all together with another excellent performance of passion and power that further proves that she’s the real deal. Her portrayal of grief and loneliness is one that isolates her from almost all social interactions and yet she still finds ways to make her character more accessible and vulnerable than she has in previous roles. She elevates the flimsy material to such a level that it’s almost worth watching just for her but there’s too many curious missteps in Personal Shopper to give it a full-fledged endorsement.