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. Part ghost story, part character study and part psychological thriller, it divided its premiere audience before going on to be counted among the most original films of its year.

Stewart plays Maureen, a grieving medium drifting through Paris and the world of high fashion while she waits for a message from beyond, and almost everything in the performance happens inside her. Assayas builds long, hypnotic passages around her solitude. In one celebrated sequence a run of escalating text messages turns a smartphone into an instrument of dread, and the film keeps open whether the threat is supernatural, criminal or psychological, trusting mood and ambiguity over explanation.

Critics saw Stewart's work as a turning point in her career and praised the nerve with which Assayas mixes registers, though the film still divides viewers. It is eerie and very modern, and Personal Shopper uses the trappings of the ghost story to get at grief, the search for connection and some distinctly contemporary anxieties. For us it is one of the most distinctive European films of its decade and a high point of a singular collaboration. The text-message sequence has become a reference for how cinema dramatises technology and dread, and the performance is now seen as the moment Stewart remade herself as a serious actress.