Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart made this shortly after the excellent Clouds of Sils Maria. I skipped it at the time because its reviews were only middling but I’m come back because the trajectory of Stewart’s acting career continues to be impressive. Unfortunately it turns out that the reviews were right. Combining a ghost story with that of a personal shopper for a celebrity is certainly unusual but I kept waiting for some connection to appear which never arrives. The film plays the usual games of ambiguity with the supernatural and that’s not satisfying either. Stewart’s performance here is impressive. Little else about this film is.

Maureen Cartwright arrives at an empty house in Paris to spend the night. She wanders through the dim rooms as if searching for something and briefly encounters something that could be interpreted as a ghost. We learn that this was the house of Lewis, Maureen’s twin brother, who died suddenly of a heart condition with genetic causes and she is worried that she has the same condition. Both siblings are mediums and Maureen hopes to make contact with Lewis’ spirit. Meanwhile Maureen’s day job is in being a personal shopper for a celebrity, Kyra. The two rare meet but Kyra gives Maureen instructions to pick up articles of clothing, shoes, accessories and pieces of jewelry on her behalf. One day while dropping off some clothes at Kyra’s luxurious apartment, she meets Ingo, a fashion magazine editor who is Kyra’s current boyfriend but is worried that Kyra wants to break up with him. Maureen returns to Lewis’s house to spend a night alone there and flees when she is seemingly attacked by a female ghost, causing her to realize that the supernatural presence she senses might not be Lewis at all. Later she starts receiving messages on her phone from an unknown person who seems to know details of her personal life.

A sister wanting to contact her recently deceased twin and a young woman who does a subsistence-wage level job handling valuable objects for a celebrity are both potentially interesting story threads. But there’s no apparent link between the two and I got tonal whiplash switching between the two modes. The ghost story half of the film goes on to question Maureen’s obsessive need for closure and whether spirits retain enough humanity or sentience to meaningfully communicate with. The personal shopper half segues into thriller territory as she exchanges messages with the unknown interlocutor who tempts her into trying on Kyra’s clothes and sleeping on her bed. The film briefly toys with the possibility that the messages are from Lewis but I’m mystified that there is any real mystery at all. It’s so obvious to me that it must be Ingo all along as he is the only male character to be introduced. Mashing the two storylines doesn’t yield any fascinating insights to me. It’s different from anything else I’ve seen sure, but I don’t get how it’s supposed to be good.

Kirsten Steward delivers a terrific performance as Maureen but she’s hampered by the lack of any supporting characters of note. Having her emote to a vaguely seen spectral presence created through special effects just isn’t the same. The Internet is rife with theories explaining what really happens in the film and at least a couple are very clever. But none are all that convincing or satisfying to me. I’m more inclined to believe that this is pretty much what it appears to be on the surface. Assayas wanted to make a ghost story film but didn’t want to go the traditional horror movie route with the usual tropes. The result is a mixed bag that is certainly different from anything else but never coalesces into anything coherent. It was probably right for me to have skipped over it in the first place.