Review of Personal Shopper

I watched this one at the Thessaloniki film festival and I was once again impressed by the filmmaking skills of the Great Olivier Assayas, who is as self assured as anyone could be while writing and directing this cinematic riddle. But let's start with the basics. The film is about a young woman Maureen (Kristen Stewart), who works for an eccentric and spoiled celebrity, serving as her personal shopper, but also doing other irrelevant chores. Three months after her twin brother's death, who died from the same heart malformation that she has, Maureen still spends her free nights at her old family house, waiting for her brother to send her some sort of message from the afterlife. She believes that she, like her brother, is a medium and that she can have contacts with the spiritual world. But when Maureen truly opens herself to this world, whose very existence she doubts, her life gets more and more complicated and the boundaries between reality and what may be her dark fantasies (?) or the spiritual world (?) grow even harder to tell apart. The film can be interpreted as a parable about the way in which our belief in supernatural factors highly complicates our lives and after a certain point, as we begin to interpret even the most tedious and unimportant events of our routine as miraculous interference of a greater force or being. But even if you approach it plot-wise only, it is still extremely engaging and unexpectedly terrifying, as you are filled, like the film's protagonist, with uncertainty about the future. You simply cannot predict what is about to happen, because the film is like the mysterious entity that keeps messaging Maureen; it is impossible to safely say which its intentions are. What may actually cause hate and dislike towards the film from most people is how much it relies on the decisions of the audience. After the brilliant texting sequence, which had me on the edge of my seat, it is entirely up to you to say what is really happening. You even get to decide if a character is living or dead, real or unreal, which to my mind is thrilling, but to many a man it will be unimaginably tiring and pointless. But then there is a career - best performance by the electrifying Kristen Stewart and Assayas' masterful direction which, along with a script that demands attention and inspires countless conversations, render "Personal Shopper" an unforgettable experience.