Personal Shopper (2016) - Olivier Assayas

If you were going to make a guess at which young American actress would turn out to be the muse for European director Assayas, you probably wouldn’t guess at Kristin Stewart, but the surprises are what make art live, you know?  In this, their second collaboration, Stewart plays an assistant/personal shopper for a wealthy woman in the world of high fashion.  She’s also wracked with grief over the death of her twin brother and driven by that grief to seek for contact with her brother on the other side.  The film is a full-on Stewart piece and she’s absolutely fantastic, marrying the easy naturalism that marks a lot of her best work to a quiet devastation.  The supporting cast is good, however, though they typically get a scene and then they’re gone; of special note are Anders Danielsen Lie as a friend of Stewart’s brother & Lars Eidinger as the lover of Stewart’s boss.  This film is really masterful and vivid.  I went into it expecting an artsy meditation on death with some ambiguously ghostly elements; I certainly got a lot of that, but the film is also a really visceral horror film & a compellingly, teasingly smart mystery.  There’s a sequence of Stewart alone in a darkened apartment that is as terrifying as just about anything I’ve seen in a theater lately and the film’s mystery elements are fascinatingly done and the intrigue builds as the film progresses.  It’s a film that should absolutely be seen without watching the trailer, which gives away a couple of key plot points, as well as tipping the hand of that intensely scary scene I wasn’t expecting.  If you require neatly tied up plots, this may not be the movie for you; the film does have ambiguity and I found particularly beautiful the way in which this figures into the climax of the film.  Assayas literally fades out at exactly the moment of climax and when the screen comes back up, we’ve missed a really key moment that could help us understand things a little better; this doesn’t feel like a cheat or like someone dodging a story difficulty and so it’s powerful and not frustrating.  For me, it really exploded the whole notion of the film and puzzling over exactly what happened during those brief moments I wasn’t privy to was thrilling and I think that section, though there are a lot of other really wonderful sequences in the film, ends up being the most intriguing, bold and compellingly brilliant part of the film.  This film is ultimately successful on many levels: a gripping thriller, an evocative character piece & a moving meditation on death and grief.  It’s a movie that’s going to slip by a lot of people for a lot of reasons and that’s a shame.  It’s a real gem, perfectly detailed, elegant and beautiful.  4 stars.

tl;dr – a great lead performance anchors this gem, a spooky, atmospheric mystery-thriller by way of an artsy, evocative character study; don’t miss this small, sly masterpiece.  4 stars.

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The Tombs of Anak (1987) - Frank E. Peretti

This is the third book in Peretti’s series about the Cooper family and it’s the best, at least of the first four; there was a long break after the first four and then Peretti ended up coming back quite a long time later with three more and one of those three is a possible contender for best of the series as well.  In this book, an archaeological dig goes south when a young member of the expedition ventures deep into a hidden tomb and then disappears.  The Coopers arrive to investigate and find themselves in a strange world.  What happened to the man who disappeared?  What makes that strange wailing sound at night?  What of the tales of a six-fingered god that wreaks vengeance on all who disturb his tomb?  This book is just pure pulp adventure-horror.  It scared me so badly when I was a kid that I couldn’t finish it.  I put it away and didn’t finish it for years when I first tried to read it.  There are still a couple of sequences that work well even as an adult for the scares and this book is, on the whole, just the hardest and edgiest of the entire series.  People actually die in this book in quite gruesome ways; two significant characters die at different points in this book and while the book is vague on the details, it hints well enough that things are pretty gruesome.  There’s also a disturbing scene where the main characters discover a farm where the villain of the book has slaughtered an entire herd of goats by disemboweling them.  There are still a few clunky moments, but this is Peretti’s most intense writing for children and the book has real energy, real suspense and, while it’s still present, the overt Christianity of the main characters is rendered in a less preachy way.  This one’s just great fun.  4 stars.

tl;dr – third book in Cooper adventure series frightened me intensely as a child; as an adult, it’s still a high-energy, surprisingly dark & violent entry in the series and a load of fun.  4 stars.

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