Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Jonathan Millet
Starring: Adam Bessa, Tawfeek Barhom, Julia Franz Richter, Hala Rajab, Safiqa El Till
Nothing motivates like revenge. Just as a rose bush that has been pruned by sharp blades, it is the deep cuts, the knock backs, the losses which inspire us to blossom brighter and more beautiful to redress the balance. Who doesn't love getting their own back, even when pursuing revenge goes against our better instincts? In cinema, the revenge drama satisfies our instinctive requirement for narrative balance, most often addressed in exploitation or b movies; the grubby form of which acknowledge the baseness of reprisal. Jonathan Millet's (with writing duties shared with Florence Rochat) drama/thriller Ghost Trail, however, is a more considered affair.
Hamid (Adam Bessa), a deposed Syrian literature professor, is a member of an invisible alliance of spies who track down the war criminals of Bashar al-Assad's tyrannical presidency with a view to meting out rough justice to the former captors. In a bravura performance (Bessa is onscreen throughout), as we relive Hamid's paranoia and rectitude the thriller becomes a meditation on the spiritual significances of vengeance: a hot stone we carry even as it blisters our hands.
Ghost Trail opens with a scene of vivid displacement. Along with a group of other broken prisoners, Hamid is dumped in the desert from the back of a truck to be unceremoniously yelled at by gun toting soldiers. The iconography of bloody shirts, limping gaits, defeated bodies and souls is queasily familiar, a recurring geopolitical motif. One man collapses in the endless flat vista, a sure portent of not only his death but others to come (in a moment which had me in tears less than five minutes in, some men hold each other up for support). "Beat it," a fat soldier instructs. Life is cheap in Sednaya. As the truck drives away, the camera foregrounds the bruised face of Hamid as he stares after the vehicle, eyes narrowing with intent.
We pick up with Hamid living incognito in Strasbourg, France, working within the gig economy as a cover for his darker purpose; tracking down his torturer, a man whose face he never saw, and who never saw his either. With a background in documentaries, Millet films in unforgiving verisimilitude. Hamid is typically presented in medium frames, with a shallow focus rendering his surroundings arcane and anonymous. The ambiguity of the opening scene is duly honoured by Ghost Trail's ensuing narrative, which is suffused with agonising uncertainty. Is the ostensibly amiable Syrian (played by a dextrous Tawfeek Barhom) who Hamid ingratiates himself with a former torturer, or, in fact, could he be someone who underwent similar treatment to our protagonist, with Hamid's desire for vengeance twisting circumstances to facilitate his need?
Hamid's quest is characterised by a one-step forwards two back dynamic: his refugee status renders him an unfortunately automatic figure of suspicion in his adopted home, and interactions with the community are understandably fraught with mistrust and reluctance. Most people want to move on, to forge ahead with what remains of their life, yet Hamid remains in this urban limbo, which is intentionally drained of colour by cinematographer Olivier Boonjing. Hamid's mother, via zoom calls, urges her son to "build a new life," but this interface is too built on subterfuge, with Hamid hiring a suit to wear during the conversations so he can keep up the false narrative of his successful existence as a professor. He meets a woman, Yara (Hala Rajab), with whom he seems to share a chemistry, but such is the immutable purpose of his objective, we sense immediately that the relationship will be secondary to Hamid's cause.
Technology and its limitations pointedly recur through the film, with Hamid's mission based upon a blurred photograph and his motivation provided by aurally recorded testaments of torture (which provide little information, instead galvanising Hamid). He meets the other members of the global vigilante group via an online COD style game (I'm sorry but I couldn't help thinking of rubber dinghy rapids-!), the disembodied voices sharing intel and stories like ghosts in a vast machine. Within the palpable paranoia of Ghost Trail there is a poignant suggestion that Hamid, fractured and displaced, may only ever find validation in the promise of bloody revenge.
Ghost Trail is in UK/ROI cinemas from September 19th.
