Personal Shopper
26/08/17 Filed in: Amazon rental
Personal Shopper competed for the Palme d"Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. We were in Nice at the time and saw a couple of 'Cannes' films at local cinemas, but not this one. It is now on Amazon for rental at £1.99, so we viewed it on Thursday evening. All I knew about it was that Kristen Stewart plays a personal shopper, and that there was a psychological mystery aspect.
Set mainly in Paris, Maureen Cartwright, the shopper, is first introduced to us as she arrives at an old house, accompanied by another woman. She is left there alone, and the place is quite spooky. It transpires it is the house where Maureen's brother lived, the woman who accompanied her there being her brother's girlfriend, Lara. Her brother, who was her twin, is dead. The reason for being in the house is that potential buyers want go be sure that it is free from evil spirits, but Maureen also would like to try to make contact with her brother. Both he and Maureen believed themselves to be mediums, each having promised to try to make contact in the event of the other's death. It appears that her brother, Lewis, was more convinced of the medium thing than Maureen, who seems at times to be somewhat ambivalent. She does encounter a spirit, but it isn't Lewis, and once the spirit has left her job there is done.
The client for whom she shops is Kyra, a self-possessed individual who spares Maureen scant time as she flits from place to place. Maureen doesn't like the job, and her boyfriend, Gary, who is working in Oman, asks her to join him. But she feels she can't leave Paris until she's sure that she can't contact Lewis. During one brief 'meeting' with Kyra she encounters Ingo, Kyra's lover, who had told Maureen that Kyra was planning to break up the relationship.
Maureen travels to London to pick up clothes and during the trip she receives text messages from an unknown number. The messenger seems to know a lot about her, and her activities, and at one point she believes they could be from Lewis. But the truth is more prosaic. More mysterious things happen, culminating in Maureen finding Kyra murdered in her apartment. Throughout there are hints of Lewis's presence.
With her job now definitively over, Maureen decides to visit Gary in Oman. Before leaving she meets Lara's new boyfriend, who is sure that he has felt Lewis's presence. As Maureen sits alone in the garden a face is seen in the kitchen, and a glass drops to the floor. Maureen shrugs this off as an accident, but when she arrives at a remote mountain village in Oman she witnesses something that's not as easy to shrug off.
I found this film quite scary in a psychological way. Shades of Hitchcock. As Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian noted, "The hairs on the back of my neck bristled." It's a film that perhaps pleased critics more than audiences but there's a fine performance from Stewart that really shouldn't be missed.
Maureen travels to London to pick up clothes and during the trip she receives text messages from an unknown number. The messenger seems to know a lot about her, and her activities, and at one point she believes they could be from Lewis. But the truth is more prosaic. More mysterious things happen, culminating in Maureen finding Kyra murdered in her apartment. Throughout there are hints of Lewis's presence.
With her job now definitively over, Maureen decides to visit Gary in Oman. Before leaving she meets Lara's new boyfriend, who is sure that he has felt Lewis's presence. As Maureen sits alone in the garden a face is seen in the kitchen, and a glass drops to the floor. Maureen shrugs this off as an accident, but when she arrives at a remote mountain village in Oman she witnesses something that's not as easy to shrug off.
I found this film quite scary in a psychological way. Shades of Hitchcock. As Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian noted, "The hairs on the back of my neck bristled." It's a film that perhaps pleased critics more than audiences but there's a fine performance from Stewart that really shouldn't be missed.