This is a measured, richly ambiguous work about the subjective process of grief — masquerading as a ghost story — that experiments with the minutiae of film language as only a master of the medium can do.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
The Film Stage by Giovanni Marchini Camia
As per Assayas’ custom, the film is chock-full of fascinating themes and ideas and his indisputable flair as a director makes it compulsively watchable.
Amid all the shifting mirrored surfaces and hazy ambiguities of Olivier Assayas's bewitching, brazenly unconventional ghost story, this much can be said with certainty: Kristen Stewart has become one hell of an actress.
Personal Shopper is a mess — not an uninteresting one, and better that than a staid, unadventurous bore, but a mess nonetheless.
As Personal Shopper progresses a rather predictable series of twists almost drain the story of interest.
Screen International by Lee Marshall
Ultimately, all we have to hold on to in a story that lurches inexorably into CGI absurdity is our emotional connection with Stewart’s lost, lonely character.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
It is actually Assayas’s best film for a long time, and Stewart’s best performance to date.
This reunion between Kristen Stewart and the director who gave her one of her best-ever roles in 2014’s “Clouds of Sils Maria” is a broken, but never boring mix of spine-tingling horror story, dreary workplace drama and elliptical identity search, likely to go down as one of the most divisive films of Stewart’s career.
The Telegraph by Robbie Collin
The film depends on a performance from Stewart in which she’s virtually never off-screen or less than riveting.
The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy
This aggravatingly empty would-be suspense piece puts all its trust in its star to save the day, but even this compulsively watchable performer can’t elevate such a vapid, undeveloped screenplay.