Maureen, a young American living in Paris, fits nowhere since the death of her twin brother. She spends evenings trying to connect with him in the afterlife. They both claimed the spiritual skills of a medium to examine the beyond, and promised that the first to pass would reach out to the survivor with some message. During the day she is the fashion assistant to a wealthy "high-profile media personality who doesn't have the time to worry about practical things." Understandably, Maureen is skittish 24 hours a day. Even more so when an occult figure makes a milky, ectoplasmic appearance before her eyes. And further still when anonymous messages from a possible stalker flood her iPhone.
At the center of almost every shot in "Personal Shopper," Kristen Stewart is sharply focused and totally committed to the role of a woman for whom life, death and the everyday environment don't add up anymore. Her second collaboration with French director Olivier Assayas (after 2014's "Clouds of Sils Maria") is a handsome, peculiar amalgam of supernatural thriller, character portrait and crime story. It's also a challenging choice for Stewart, who is film-by-film erasing memories of her "Twilight" work. This project fits her, since, like romance, horror is a genre usually devoted to female characters. Her tense Maureen is unmoored in the shallow, materialistic fashion world, and unable to reach spiritually beyond it.
As much a study of solitude, intimacy and otherworldly longings as it is a contemporary ghost story, the film is both genuinely scary and psychologically serious.
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