Personal Shopper
(2016)Kristen Stewart and her Clouds of Sils Maria director Olivier Assayas team up again for this ethereal and mysterious ghost story. Stewart plays a high-fashion personal shopper to the stars who is also a spiritual medium. Grieving the recent death of her twin brother, she haunts his Paris home, determined to make contact with him. Winner of Best Director at Cannes 2016.
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Best Director, Cannes Film Festival 2016
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Directed by Olivier Assayas
Starring Kristen Stewart, Anders Danielsen Lie, Lars Eidinger, Nora von Waldstätten, Sigrid Bouaziz, Ty Olwin, Hammou Graïa, Benjamin Biolay
Written by Olivier Assayas
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DVD or Blu-Ray)
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Flicks Review
BY Tony Stamp Flicks Writer
At first glance Personal Shopper is a bit of a tonal mishmash, as we follow Kristen Stewart’s character Maureen through encounters in Paris both mundane and supernatural. It’s a character study that doubles as a ghost story, a fable about wealth, a pulp thriller, and involves a lot of scenes focused on text messaging. But primarily it’s about grieving for a loved one, and the ways that grief can manifest itself.... More
Maureen has recently lost a twin brother, and his presence looms over the story, growing larger as the film heads into its charged second half. Scenes that are initially unthreatening begin to gather a sense of dread, and Maureen starts to become unhinged.
Stewart is fantastic as Personal Shopper’s unreliable point of view. At first she’s an enigma, coasting in a comfy, unsatisfying job, but a series of paranormal encounters and increasingly threatening text messages start to strain her calm appearance. Maureen is, after all, still suffering from a huge loss, and possibly not all that sane. Or is she? That’s the tightrope being walked, and it works because Stewart and her director Olivier Assayas work to keep each moment grounded.
Assayas also has the task of managing all the film’s various threads, and for the most part he does (he shared the Best Director award at Cannes). The denouement is frustratingly on the nose, but everything leading up to it is superbly crafted, naturalistic and by turns claustrophobic. Personal Shopper may prove too obtuse for some viewers, but its various elements form a mostly satisfying whole.Hide
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Personal Shopper
BY cinemusefilm superstar
The plot hinges on a brother and sister pact that whoever dies first from their shared congenital heart condition will contact the other from the next world. It is months since her brother died, and Maureen (Kristen Stewart) is still waiting for a sign that he is at peace. Her continued emotional pain and closeness to him is palpable and she is suppressing grief trauma just enough to function. She lives in a world of shadows, both as a personal shopper for a mega-celebrity and as a spiritual medium awaiting contact with the dead. When she starts receiving unidentified text messages that appear to know too much about her, she is unsure if it is her brother or a stalker. There is unmistakable eroticism in how she reacts to the texts and in her relationship with the demanding celebrity. The texts become domineering and lead the story into unpredictable and weird territory.
Audiences hoping to witness genuine contact with a departed soul will be disappointed. In its place, they will find a disjointed montage of outer-worldly and mortally sinister possibilities that rely on the viewer joining the dots. Despite the marketing hype, this film lacks originality and narrative coherence. There is an abundance of tired ghostly tropes like floating translucent veils, self-levitating glasses, and a haunted house with creaking floorboards to make sure we know it’s a ghost story. Maureen’s job as a personal shopper is a narrative construction to reveal her fetish in dressing up and even masturbating in outrageously expensive clothes. Unless you are a voyeur for people’s private conversations, the prolonged sequences of iPhone texting from an unknown source can become tiresome. The cinematography is classically supernatural: dark, dark, and then darker scenes with some illuminated only by the whites of Kristen’s eyes. The main redeeming feature of this film is Kristen Stewart herself. Whether the script is convincing or otherwise, she has the talent to carry the role in all its mercurial variations, from the fast-talking fashionista, to terrified victim, to the sister poignantly mourning the loss of her beloved brother.
In an increasingly secular world, fans of this genre will keep searching for original, plausible, and scary supernatural films that explore the existence of an afterlife. After all, the genre itself exists to give vicarious expression to our fear of death. In one way, Personal Shopper makes a fresh contribution to the genre with its depiction of iPhone technology as the new séance platform for communicating with the unknown. But the film also falls back on old genre standbys like chatting to a ghost via the slamming of doors. Overall, it has enough eerie atmosphere, dramatic tension and unexpected twists to be entertaining, but it is Kirsten Stewart alone who saves it from mediocrity.Hide
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The Press Reviews
Think of an episode of Scooby-Doo, add product placement by Chanel, plus a soupçon of French existentialism, and you have some sense of the sheer bonkersness of Personal Shopper. Full Review
Stewart is engrossing as the grieving twin and invisible employee whose own health issues make an early death a distinct possibility. Full Review
Amid all the shifting mirrored surfaces and hazy ambiguities of Olivier Assayas's bewitching, brazenly unconventional ghost story, this much can be said with certainty: Kristen Stewart has become one hell of an actress. Full Review
Kristen Stewart's performance is tremendous: she is calm and blank in the self-assured way of someone very competent, smart and young, yet her displays of emotion are very real and touching. Full Review
Even Kristen Stewart can't save this undernourished mystery. Full Review
A broken, but never boring mix of spine-tingling horror story, dreary workplace drama and elliptical identity search, likely to go down as one of the most divisive films of Stewart's career. Full Review
Part horror, psychological thriller, rom-com, art-house and content marketing for Chanel personafied by the never-better Kristen Stewart. Full Review
The most interesting film in which the mysterious creature Kristen Stewart has appeared, and the oddest. Full Review
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