War stains the soul. It can haunt its victims like a specter, and the appropriately titled Ghost Trail centers on a scarred man who hovers through the world as if he were a ghost himself. Adam Bessa portrays Hamid, a Syrian literature professor from Aleppo who experiences personal catastrophe during the height of Syrian civil war. During his torturous detainment at Sednaya Prison — infamously known as the “Human Slaughterhouse” — he loses his wife and child to a bomb blast. Upon being freed, Hamid resettles in Germany, secretly collaborating with a vigilante cell pursuing the Syrian regime’s fugitive leaders. When his latest mission puts him on the trail of a man he believes to be his former torturer, his obsessive desire for justice complicates the new life he is building for himself.
As director Jonathan Millet’s first fiction feature, Ghost Trail benefits from his documentary background. Millet had originally planned to approach the film as a documentary, spending weeks speaking with Syrians at a treatment center for war and torture victims. Listening to their stories, he learned more about the underground networks of evidence hunters who sought after escaped war criminals. While prioritizing its character beats over its procedural ones, Ghost Trail builds its narrative architecture on a foundation of facts — Germany and France being the locations for the action, the methods of espionage Hamid employs, the ethical dilemmas dividing the group — that lend the drama its authentic texture. The consistently static camera and deliberately paced scenes slow down the viewer’s experience of time, reflecting how interminable the months of quiet observation feel for Hamid as his psyche strains. The use of natural sound pushes the film into the realm of hyperrealism, at key moments infusing the environments with a true-to-life tactility. In Ghost Trail, there’s an importance placed on what is tangible and what can be perceived. Hamid gathers intelligence on the streets, takes photographs, examines documents and recordings, all so he can be certain this is indeed his man. Evidential value is located in a thing’s material essence, this solidity counterbalancing the nature of the regime’s violent terror — kidnappings and disappearances, extrajudicial ambiguity, the horror of depersonalization and of absence.
If one side of this slow-burning spy thriller’s coin is its fixation on the physical, then its exploration of the psychological is the other. The main engine of Ghost Trail is Bessa’s captivating performance as Hamid. Bessa radiates this placid intensity, a constant look of stoic determination stretched paper thin to conceal an ocean of anguish beneath. The film presses the viewer to observe its protagonist just as he observes his target, searching for signs of truth beneath his mask. Hamid is a man who is alert but never present, his mind still imprisoned by the memories of what he’s suffered. Ghost Trail externalizes his internal hell, then, through its soundtrack, a nightmarish sonic landscape of distorted whispers and amplified feedback swelling within a pressurized vessel. Bessa, for his part, also worked with the crew to nail down the character’s physicality; Hamid’s pain and conflict are communicated through the rigidity of his gait and the tension in his body language. But b contrast, Ghost Trail’s supporting characters feel much more one-dimensional. Save for the suspect in Hamid’s sights, the enigmatic Rammah (grippingly played by Tawfeek Barhom), the other characters in Hamid’s orbit operate either as plot devices or foils, limiting the story’s scope to a character study of sorts. Yet Bessa is so magnetic as Hamid, who demonstrates greater layers over the course of the runtime, that he still manages to carry the film effectively enough.
Ghost Trail’s examination of trauma is its strongest thematic asset, though it’s also concerned with questions of justice. Those who have been victimized, marginalized, and displaced, whose paths toward healing and starting anew face a plethora of institutional obstacles daily, how can they most adequately seek justice? At what point does justice masquerade as revenge? Does the heinousness of the perpetrators justify any means of retribution? Here Ghost Trail is less incisive, with these points more broadly gestured at in discrete moments of dialogue. Millet, who co-wrote the screenplay, has said he wants the film to seek out any “possible hope” at all odds, and so the film insists on circumventing the tragic outcomes that its tragic structure suggests it will unpack. As the rays of optimistic light grow brighter in Ghost Trail’s latter half, the film too has a muddier handle on its resolution of certain conflicts. The result is that Millet’s film pursues truthful hyperrealism and sets up a premise with a compelling range of threads, before somewhat buckling under its own weight and settling for a firmly, frustratingly anodyne final catharsis.
Published as part of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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