By Emilio Frenk.
Director: Olivier Assayas
Cast: Kristen Stewart, Lars Eidinger, Sigrid Bouaziz, Anders Danielsen Lie, Ty Olwin, Hammou Graïa and Pascal Rambert.
Rating: Excellent.
French director Olivier Assayas teams up for the second time with Kristen Stewart after their previous collaboration on “Clouds of Sills Maria”. Together they bring “Personal Shopper” a frightening thriller that works at all levels.
The movie tells the story of Maureen Cartwright (Kristen Stewart) an American Personal Shopper who recently lost her twin brother and works for a model and celebrity in Paris.
After a series of events that begin to happen during her stay in Paris, Maureen begins to feel the spirits that have a relationship with his twin brother. She eventually begins to establish communication with them and this will represent an opportunity to Maureen to find peace and try to move on after the tragic death her brother suffered.
“Personal Shopper” without a doubt is one of the most finest thrillers I´ve seen and at the same time is very well directed and acted.
Olivier Assayas not only directed a good and intense thriller, but wrote a marvelous screenplay. He knew how to play with tension and manipulated us as the audience from every single moment the movie starts.
The screenplay is very well written and Assayas was very smart in how to take advantage on key moments and wrote a great character on Maureen, who constantly we see her both internal and external conflicts during the film.
Kristen Stewart´s performance as Maureen is real and I have been very impressed with her growth as an actress. The way she brought her character to life is filled so much realism that we fill her and we are constantly in her shoes.
I felt that Olivier Assayas was very influenced by movies from Alfred Hitchcock specially because of the way how he shot his film and the way he manipulated the audience and was very smart on using correctly the elements of surprise of the film.
Other thing that I loved of “Personal Shopper” was the fact that it´s taken place in the fashion world which has never been seen before and I loved how Assayas portrayed that world in his film.
As I mentioned before Kristen Stewart´s growth has been surprising and this is so far the best performance of her career.
This movie has a fantastic ending and honestly once I finished watching the film I left the room with a lot of questions.
“Personal Shopper” is one of the year´s best thrillers and I give it a huge recommendation for the directing of Olivier Assayas, his screenplay and the performance by Kristen Stewart.