In cinemas now

Kristen Stewart reunites with Olivier Assayas after winning a César Award for her supporting turn in Clouds of Sils Maria, stepping up to provide star billing in a confused and confusing arthouse genre clash that can’t quite bring itself to wholly embrace supernatural shocks nor Hitchcockian intrigue.  Nevertheless, these flaws become more than the sum of their parts and provide enough warp and weft to knit its messy strands together.

Much of this is down to Stewart, who is rarely off-screen and nimbly dances round the many pitfalls that could have sunk the film outright.  Now so firmly established as an indie darling that the Twilight monolith feels like an Oz-size aberration; she flits between painful reticence, suppressed grief, and twitchy, jittery emotion as Maureen, a personal shopper for a horrid supermodel who is also a medium.  She is peeling the days off the calendar in Paris, awaiting a sign from the afterlife from her twin brother Lewis, recently felled by the same congenital heart defect that could yet kill her.

Her allegedly glamorous, yet chronically mundane job is enlivened by the smoky CG spirits she finds in her brother’s tumbledown house, and the mysterious texts she receives.  These occupy the entire duration of an audacious sequence in which the messages come thick and fast.  Are they from her brother? Another spirit with ambiguous intentions?  Her own subconscious? Or something more prosaically creepy? That Assayas not only gets away with a scene in which Stewart looks at her phone for twenty minutes, but creates genuine knotty tension from a phone being switched from airplane mode to active is something at which to marvel.

Assayas also knows exactly how best to utilise his leading lady.  Often the least starry of the young Hollywood megastars, Stewart looks at home in the shapeless jumpers that Maureen favours.  When she breaks her employer’s one golden rule and tries on her clothes, the full force of her sleepy-eyed charisma comes through.  It’s a sexy and poignant scene of someone finding their inner confidence, although only in the privacy of her own company.  It’s one facet of a deeply intelligent performance.

Personal Shopper is undoubtedly baggy and scrappy; not quite the haute couture number one would perhaps hope for.  A few loose strands here and there detract from a flawless finish.  However, it’s imperfections are very much part of the fascination.  For all Assayas’ reluctance to wallow in the supernatural, when he does choose to let a few choice scares loose from his miser’s wallet, the spine undeniably tingles.  One of these experiences that leaves you pondering what you’ve just seen, and hankering for a second viewing.