Personal Shopper

Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper (2016) won him the Best Director prize at Cannes — shared with another film — and reunited him with Kristen Stewart after Clouds of Sils Maria. A genre-defying blend of ghost story, character study and psychological thriller, it divided its premiere audience before being widely embraced as one of the year's most original films.

Stewart, in a performance of remarkable interiority, plays Maureen, the grieving medium drifting through Paris and the world of high fashion while awaiting a message from beyond. Assayas builds long, hypnotic passages around her solitude — a celebrated sequence of escalating text messages turns a smartphone into an instrument of dread — and refuses to resolve whether the haunting is supernatural, criminal or psychological. The film floats free of conventional explanation, trusting mood and ambiguity.

Critics hailed Stewart's work as a turning point in her career and praised Assayas's audacious mixing of registers, though its open-endedness remains debated. Eerie, modern and quietly profound about grief and the search for connection, Personal Shopper uses the trappings of the ghost story to explore very contemporary anxieties. It is one of the most distinctive European films of its decade, and a high point of a singular collaboration. Its much-discussed text-message sequence has become a touchstone for how modern cinema dramatises technology and dread, and Stewart's performance is now seen as a pivotal moment in her reinvention as a serious actress.