There’s a particular kind of defensiveness that emerges whenever an art-house film slips, however briefly, into the mainstream. It’s the reflex of the self-appointed gatekeeper—the “film bro” who insists that meaning must be earned through obscurity, that accessibility is a kind of dilution. Personal Shopper was one of those films. Upon its release, it generated an unusual amount of attention for something so resolutely interior, so resistant to easy categorization. And yet, rather than being embraced for that permeability, it was policed—its audience scrutinized, its admirers quietly judged.
What was curious, then, was not that people outside the usual cinephile circles were drawn to it, but that they were discouraged from doing so. The reasons given were telling: some dismissed it as a byproduct of Olivier Assayas’s prior acclaim, particularly Clouds of Sils Maria; others reduced its appeal to the presence of Kristen Stewart. The implication, thinly veiled, was that appreciation of the film required a kind of purity—one untainted by star recognition or casual interest.
But this kind of thinking fundamentally misunderstands the film itself. Because Personal Shopper is, at its core, a work about permeability—between worlds, identities, and modes of being. It is a ghost story, yes, but one that refuses the binary logic typically associated with the genre. There are no clearly defined forces of good and evil, no visible threat to counterbalance the unseen. Instead, Assayas constructs a space in which presence itself becomes ambiguous—where the spiritual and the mundane exist in uneasy coexistence.
From its opening moments, the film establishes this ambiguity with remarkable precision. The approach to the house—a long, leaf-covered driveway captured in wide, observational framing—eschews the visual grammar of horror. There is no tightening of the frame, no manipulation of perspective to induce dread. Instead, the camera observes, allowing the environment to assert itself. The effect is disarming. What should feel ominous instead feels natural, even serene. The unease emerges not from what is shown, but from what is withheld.
This restraint extends to the film’s treatment of the supernatural. Maureen, played by Stewart in what remains one of her most quietly radical performances, is introduced not as a conventional medium but as someone uncertain of her own sensitivity. Her search for contact with her deceased twin brother is not framed as a mission but as a compulsion—an unresolved thread of grief that refuses closure. The spirits, if they are indeed present, are not antagonistic. They simply exist, occupying the same space without explanation or intent.
Assayas has spoken about his rejection of the traditional American horror paradigm—the notion that what is unseen must inherently be feared. In Personal Shopper, visibility and morality are decoupled. The unseen is not an enemy; it is a condition. This distinction is crucial, because it shifts the film’s focus away from fear and toward something far more elusive: uncertainty.
That uncertainty is mirrored in Maureen’s daily life, which unfolds in parallel to her spiritual search. Her work as a personal shopper—moving through the rarefied world of haute couture, selecting garments for a celebrity she rarely interacts with—becomes a study in alienation. Unlike the heightened caricature of fashion seen in The Devil Wears Prada, this is a world defined not by spectacle but by distance. Maureen is present but peripheral, essential yet invisible.
This duality—between presence and absence, agency and passivity—extends to her sense of self. Much of her identity has been shaped in relation to her twin, whose certainty she once mirrored without question. In his absence, she is left to navigate a kind of existential vacuum. Her attempts to contact him are as much about self-definition as they are about grief. If he can confirm the existence of another world, then perhaps her own uncertainty can be resolved.
Yet the film resists resolution at every turn. Even its most overtly suspenseful element—the series of anonymous text messages Maureen begins to receive—refuses to conform to genre expectations. The device is at once modern and uncanny, transforming something as mundane as digital communication into a conduit for existential dread. The messages are intrusive but not overtly threatening, intimate yet impersonal. They destabilize not through action, but through implication.
What emerges, then, is not a conventional narrative but a state of being. Personal Shopper is less concerned with what happens than with how it feels to exist in a world where meaning is constantly deferred. Its pacing, often criticized as languid, is in fact essential to its effect. The film demands patience—not as a test of endurance, but as a means of attunement. To engage with it is to inhabit Maureen’s uncertainty, to experience the slow erosion of boundaries between the tangible and the intangible.
This is what makes the film so singular, and perhaps so divisive. It does not offer the reassurance of clarity or the satisfaction of resolution. Instead, it lingers in the unresolved, in the spaces between certainty and doubt. It is a ghost story not about the dead, but about the living—about the ways in which grief, labor, and identity intersect to create a sense of dislocation that no supernatural explanation can fully resolve.
To call it strange is not inaccurate. But it is a productive kind of strangeness—one that challenges the viewer not to decode it, but to sit with it. And in doing so, Personal Shopper reveals itself not as an enigma to be solved, but as an experience to be endured, questioned, and, ultimately, felt.