A whole new meaning to the term ‘ghosting’

FILM REVIEW alone, in an urgent bid to pursue any kind of meaningful sign. What she discovers instead is a corollary mystery: texts from an unknown number, enigmatic and teasing, that draw Maureen into what she believes is a running dialogue by iMessage with a sibling in the hereafter.

Assayas, ever the intellectual, makes unmistakable the connection to tradition at play here: belief in spirits, in both their existence and our capacity to communicate with them, has always been tied to innovations in technology. Why not the iPhone, too?

What gives Maureen’s chats with the dead a charge is the element of seduction lurking beneath them. There is something sexual — something taboo, never articulated — about the messages she sends and receive. Assayas homes in on the intensity of all conversation by text message, on the peculiar power of this form of communication and on the ways in which it can still strike us as disturbing.

One hardly needs to imagine texting a ghost for the anxieties seized upon by the film to resonate. It’s in the very nature of the medium, Assayas wants to suggest, to kindle unease. Our phones are as exhilarating as they are frightening. Simply receiving a text from anyone is suspenseful enough.

Of course, another way to put this is that every text message is a ghost story. Everyone we know, once reduced to words on the screen of our phones, becomes in essence a phantom. Maureen texting Lewis would be hard to differentiate in character or kind from Maureen texting her boyfriend or her boss. Which is a point Assayas makes elegantly.

“We never see each other,” Maureen complains early on about her ever-absent boss. “We just leave each other messages.” It’s the relationship of two strangers, ghosts to one another always. Nor, tellingly, do Maureen and her boyfriend ever share the screen: they’re half a world apart and keep in touch exclusively over Skype. All of Maureen’s relationships operate at some degree of remove. So it’s not only her brother she aspires to contact; everyone she loves, everyone she knows, is a kind of spectre, a veritable wraith.

These are ghost stories. And every text puts her in touch with the dead. ∂∂∂1/2