The ghost movie inspires personal reflection on the experience of losing a loved one, and it may be the ideal vessel for exploring the grieving process.

What Assayas knew, and what “Personal Shopper” invites Stewart to share with us through her own experience, is that loss isn’t just a process of deprivation, but also one of dislocation. Grief, in my limited frame of reference, is like getting lost on the street where you’ve lived your whole life. It’s a dreadful state of nonsense. It’s not something for which you can adequately prepare in advance. And Assayas’ film respects that — it is pockmarked with ellipses that are never filled, crucial details that are left off-screen, questions that are unanswered as Maureen is slowly thrown back upon herself.

Losing someone is a fact, but it’s a fact that has to be learned like a language. You cry uncontrollably, harder than you have since you were an infant, because you don’t have the words to express how you feel. They come to you, but they come to you slowly and in puzzle pieces you lack the grammar to put together. And when you finally figure out how to speak, when you finally figure out how to take the negative space between all your missing pieces and arrange them into sentences, your only reward is the realization that you’ve been talking to yourself the whole time. What “Personal Shopper” ultimately expresses better than any other movie is that grief begins as a process of reconciling yourself to all the ways in which someone is gone, but it ends as a process of recognizing all the ways in which they’re still here. Still a part of you.

“Wherever we leave Maureen,” Assayas concluded, talking around the powerfully elliptical coda that closes out his new film, “she’s decided, ultimately, that her brother is within her, and that he will stay there.” The director thought about that for a moment, turning the words over in his head. “You’re really on your own with grieving.”

But thanks to films like “Personal Shopper,” that’s not entirely true.

***

On a long-enough timeline, every movie is a ghost story.

I watched “Personal Shopper” again after speaking to Stewart and Assayas. I thought about how Maureen convinced herself (and me) that she was receiving texts from the afterlife, about all the ways in which she attempts to contact her dead brother, and it occurred to me that this is a film about a woman who thinks she’s looking for a doorway, but spends most of her time staring into mirrors. Maureen might be able to see electrical ghost energy as it crackles around a darkened hallway, but she’s more haunted than any of the houses that she’s hired to investigate. She sees her brother within herself, and everything else is just a trick of the light.

Of course, I see my dad in every cloud of cigar smoke and in the jowls that seem to be forming a little faster on either side of my face. I feel him in the uncharacteristically stylish boots that I found in his closet after he died, that fit me despite the fact that our feet were several sizes apart, and that I’ve worn almost every day since his death. I even catch myself searching for him in his characteristically eclectic favorite movies (“Doctor Zhivago,” “History of the World: Part One,” “Analyze This, “Mamma Mia!”, and “Django Unchained”), squinting at the screen as though he might make a cameo. But it was only in “Personal Shopper,” a movie he never lived to see (and one he likely would have slept through), that I’ve ever found him. It’s the only movie that ever made me feel like he might pick up the phone whenever I forgot myself enough to call.

The dead live in our bodies and run through our eyes like film being threaded through a projector, and we can’t help but see them reflecting back at us. Perhaps that’s why cinema has always been such a perfect vessel for the spectral dimension, because it mechanically articulates the process by which we’ve always been possessed by the people we’ve lost, an iron lung for our memories.

For what it’s worth, I did eventually tell Stewart and Assayas about my dad. I muttered something about him as we stood up and said our goodbyes — it was after I had stopped recording. I don’t remember what I said (even though I was far too busy listening to the words coming out of my mouth to really hear what either one of them said in response), but that’s probably for the best.

That night, I called my dad again — on purpose, this time. I had a dramatically dumb idea: I was going to leave a voicemail in which I told him all the things that I had never said, all the things that he had never been able to hear. And… the line had been disconnected.

For a moment, I was heartbroken all over again. But then, reading over the transcript of my conversation with Stewart and Assayas, I realized something, something I haven’t forgotten since: You may be on your own with grieving, but that doesn’t mean you have to live without your ghosts.

Forge ahead is now my motto, too. My dad and I, we’ll forge ahead together.

“Personal Shopper” opens in theaters on Friday, March 10.

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