PERSONAL SHOPPER: A Techno-Gothic Puzzle That Demands Your Attention

Personal Shopper doesn’t play out like a particularly ambiguous film, taking the gothic torment of the narrative seriously and at face value, offering viewers the chance to interpret events differently while unquestionably ensuring that they fully believe in the mystical events that are unfolding. It is the rare film that is unclassifiable in terms of genre, refusing to neatly fit in to the preconceptions of a horror film, as well as lacking a distinctive explanatory reading.

A puzzle waiting to be solved

It is telling that every major critic has interpreted this film in a different way; if the film feels like the cinematic equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle with a single piece missing, close to decipherable but without a concrete definition, the brilliantly understated final scene calls everything in to question, leading the audience to believe they haven’t even been looking at the image on the jigsaw the right way up.

This climactic ambiguity, which I won’t spoil (even though the fantastic final line of dialogue has been inexplicably ruined in the film’s official trailer- please avoid viewing at your peril), ensures Personal Shopper is the rare horror film that will not only stand up to repeat viewings, but have its masterful quality enhanced by them.

The film marks director Olivier Assayas’ second collaboration with actress Kristen Stewart, after an electric supporting turn in his prior film, the deliciously meta drama Clouds of Sils Maria. In that film, she played a personal assistant to Juliette Binoche’s acclaimed actress and here, she is playing another assistant- this time, the titular personal shopper who helps a egomaniac supermodel (Nora von Waldstätten) choose clothes for photoshoots and celebrity events, jetting around the continent to obtain outfits.

Stewart’s character Maureen openly hates her role, only taking it on because she had to move to Paris, where her twin brother Louis died a few months prior. Both she and her brother were mediums, who shared a pact that if one of them died they would send the other a message from the afterlife. This leads Maureen to spend waking nights in fully darkened houses, with the co-operation of Louis’ ex-girlfriend, to try to make contact, yet seldom coming close.

On a trip to London, she starts receiving anonymous text messages from an unknown number that appear to be from her deceased brother, or another tormented spirit. The experience proves both empowering, allowing her to address the self hatred towards her own existence, as well as psychologically manipulative and preying on her fears.

The boldest elements in Personal Shopper are the aforementioned texting sequences- the art of sending texts has never looked so cinematic, even managing to generate genuine threat from the wait for more messages to arrive from this otherworldly unknown number. On paper, the thought of prolonged sequences where Kristen Stewart merely texts, or reads text messages, sounds unbearable. It is testament to Assayas’ craft that he manages to make this tense, darkly funny and so important to the story, the film would not be the same without them.

A unique work indebted to the conventions of modern horror

It could be read as a more modern twist on turn of the millennium J-horror movies such as Takashi Miike’s One Missed Call, or even the deconstructive horror of Wes Craven’s Scream, a comparison amplified by Maureen sending a text about her disdain for horror movies, recalling Scream’s famous opening scene. A late sequence where Maureen turns her airplane mode off, only to receive numerous texts piling up from the unknown stalker claiming to be directly outside her building, delivers genuinely stomach churning tension.

J-Horror seems to be one of the bigger influences on Personal Shopper, as the central storyline keenly examines a familial bond disrupted by a spectral influence, a key element in the best known international works of Hideo Nakata. Like Nakata’s films, Personal Shopper is a work of overblown genre storytelling that feels understated due to how it takes the surrealistic story it is telling entirely seriously, presenting it at face value while still allowing the audience to wildly interpret in a manner of their choosing.

However intentionally or not, the influence of Guillermo Del Toro also hangs omnipresent over Assayas’ film, particularly his divisive period piece Crimson Peak. This isn’t just due to the design of the ghostly presences we see, visibly unnaturalistic figures that look like Maureen’s cigarette smoke come to life, but from the idea of a woman becoming empowered by the macabre that threatens to define her life. Through texts with the unknown number, Maureen confronts her own self loathing and even does the very thing she’s afraid to do- try on the clothes of the supermodel she assists, which couldn’t be more different to the baggy jumpers and polo shirts she wears on a daily basis.

The film’s climactic scene presents this empowerment in a completely different light- not since Michael Haneke’s Cache has an abrupt ending to a seemingly closed narrative actually proved to be the opening of a puzzle box that only repeated views can determine the answer to.

Horror cinema at its best acted and most elegantly directed

Genre films don’t usually receive acting plaudits, but Kristen Stewart’s performance here deserves all the accolades that will prove to be infuriatingly out of reach. It is as understated performance as could be expected in a horror film, made even more impressive due to the sustained periods of time devoid of spoken dialogue, where she is the only person onscreen, her visible discomfort expressed solely through her body language.

If her Cesar Award winning supporting role in Assayas’ previous film put all accusations of her being an untalented actress to sleep, her performance here is the final nail in that coffin- avoiding the hallmarks of what is typically expected by lead female actresses in horror movies to deliver something more nuanced and all the more terrifying because of it.

Although Personal Shopper falls short of explicitly deconstructing horror tropes, it does further the realisation that Olivier Assayas is the most academic filmmaker currently working. His knowledge of aesthetic conventions seems unparalleled, something explicitly shown in the fake films within a film he makes here- a documentary about ghostly paintings and a French TV movie from the 60’s about a seance, which could easily pass as realistic productions from the intended era.

He seems to take great joy at manufacturing sequences in a multitude of genres he wouldn’t work in across his entire filmography- from the cheesy YA drama briefly seen in Clouds of Sils Maria, to the repulsive Hentai inherent to the plot of 2002’s Demonlover (a film which was surely an influence on Paul Verhoeven’s Elle), he has an understanding of the cinematic medium in all its forms, yet always steadfastly refuses to let his aesthetic skills overwhelm the story at hand.

Conclusion

Personal Shopper is best defined as a work of techno-gothic ingeniousness, if it can be defined at all. If it is simply a horror film, it is the rare horror that demands repeat viewings, crafted in a surprisingly elegant manner that ensures multiple rewatches will only improve the film’s quality. It may not prove to be the best film of the year, but it is certainly the one that will welcome the most repeated visits to try to define the puzzle within.

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Personal Shopper is out now in the UK and US. All international release dates are here. 

(The below trailer is the only trailer, out of about five produced for the film, with no spoilers. Crazy, right?)