After Twilight, Paris

Kristen Stewart in the Twilight years was always more interesting than the films she was trapped in, and I say that as someone who found her genuinely attractive in a context where admitting it felt like a strange confession. The flatness, the barely-concealed annoyance, the sense that she’d rather be somewhere else—all of it was more compelling than the vampires she was supposed to be choosing between.

So when Personal Shopper arrived—a French arthouse film by Olivier Assayas in which Stewart is topless and also genuinely, seriously excellent—it felt like a correction long overdue. She plays Maureen, a personal shopper in Paris working for a celebrity she rarely sees, while waiting for some form of contact from her recently dead twin brother. Part ghost story, part grief portrait, entirely strange in the way that only French cinema still allows itself to be. She carries most of the film alone. There’s a sequence involving text messages from an unknown number that is more unsettling than anything in an actual horror film I can name.

The nudity is present—French production, comes with the territory—but it’s incidental to what the film is actually doing. The real point is that there was always more going on behind that flat affect than Hollywood franchise filmmaking knew what to do with. Personal Shopper knew. Good film. Good film and yes, she looks great.