Most supernatural ghost films function to provide visceral scares and thrills to the audience. With Personal Shopper (2016), Olivier Assayas is attempting to create a more cerebral and introspective ghost story, whose function is more to shed light on the psychological aspects of the supernatural realm rather than simply frighten the audience with jump scares. Anchored by a subtly powerful performance from Kristen Stewart, Personal Shopper is an unsettling experience that wants to disturb us more with the human realm rather than spectral apparitions.
In the film, Kristen Stewart plays Kyra, an American personal shopper for a supermodel in Paris. After the recent death of her twin brother from a heart condition, Kyra visits her late brother’s mansion to try to arrange its sale. The buyers of the property are concerned that the mansion may be haunted, so Kyra, who has a lifelong interest in the supernatural realm, decides to investigate the house. After spending a night in the mansion, Kyra may or may not be haunted by a supernatural entity as she tries to go on with her regular life.
Personal Shopper follows Kyra through her daily activities in a detached, observational manner. When Assayas reveals glimpses of what may be a ghostly presence, he does so in a purposefully ambiguous manner to question whether what we are seeing is real or just a figment of Kyra’s imagination. Indeed, as the film progresses, Assayas reveals how Kyra is gradually becoming more and more detached from the real world through the twin factors of her demanding boss and the recent death of her brother, whom she was close to.
Throughout the film, Assayas constantly subverts the viewers’ perception of reality. In one sequence, Kyra starts receiving unusual texts from an unknown person, which plays with her admiration for and jealousy for her boss. The texts are a sort of psychological game to get Kyra to defy the orders of her boss and potentially get her fired from her job. Are the texts from a real person, from the ghostly presence at her brother’s mansion, or just Kyra’s steadily fragmented grasp on her own sanity?
In a traditional supernatural film, we would see explicit manifestations of ghostly figures haunting their victims. But, with Personal Shopper Assayas is more interested in exploring the more mundane everyday life of someone who may or may not be haunted. There are long, quiet scenes of Kyra going about the daily duties of her job as a personal shopper, or getting dressed and undressed to go to sleep. By doing so, Assayas is planting his supernatural story in the most prosaic manner possible so that we are focusing as Kyra as a person rather than as some form of spiritual medium.
Indeed, the very banal nature of the film’s title itself suggests that Assayas wants to strip away all forms of sensationalism in his film. This has been something Assayas has been working towards his whole career— after more technically flashy films like Irma Vep, Demon Lover, and Boarding Gate, Assayas started to ground his films in a more naturalistic manner beginning with Summer Hours. Assayas isn’t interested in making a traditional genre picture. Instead, he wants to use the ghost story genre to tell a grounded story of a few days in the life of a young woman.
Hence, as the title suggests, Assayas is interested more in the personal realm than the supernatural realm. Kyra is not a person who has been haunted by and possibly possessed by a ghost. Rather, she is a traumatized person who is trying to regain hold of her life after the death of her beloved twin brother. Personal Shopper is less about thrilling us with loud scenes of screaming ghosts, and more about us seeing how a person can overcome grief and despair to find comfort and solace.
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