The face of a Syrian refugee is the enigmatic key to this slow-burning drama-thriller, the fiction feature debut of French film-maker Jonathan Millet; it is hard, blank, withdrawn, yet showing us an inexpressible agony, a suppressed, unprocessed trauma, complicated by what is evidently a new strategic wariness. The refugee is Hamid (played by Adam Bessa), a former literature professor from Aleppo who is now in Strasbourg in France in 2016, having suffered torture in Damascus’s notorious Sednaya prison, and the killing of his wife and infant daughter.
Hamid asks expatriate Syrians if they know a certain man, showing them a hazy photograph, claiming that this is his cousin. In fact, it is a man who tortured him and Hamid is a member of a ring dedicated to tracking down Syrian war criminals all over Europe. Haunted, exhausted and unhappy, Hamid’s only real relationship is with his elderly mother in a Lebanese refugee camp, with whom he has weekly Zoom calls; this a tender performance from Shafiqa El Till.
Finally, Hamid sees a Syrian chemistry student on a university campus called Harfaz (Tawfeek Barhom) and, based on what he smells like, becomes paranoically convinced that this is the man. Or is he just another innocent Syrian refugee trying to rebuild his life? Harfaz genially invites Hamid to join him for lunch and there is an extended, fascinatingly ambiguous dialogue scene, in which soft-spoken Harfaz appears to be sounding Hamid out about the Assad regime, or warning him to just forget about it all and move on, the way he has done.
Is Harfaz his target – or his role model? Hamid must decide that, and then decide if he is going to take justice into his own hands. In some ways, this is not unlike Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden, adapted for film by Roman Polanski, or the 70s postwar world of fugitive guilt in The Odessa File and The Night Porter. The movie sweeps ambitiously across Europe and the Middle East and shows us a complex world of pain.
• Ghost Trail is in UK cinemas from 19 September.
