Ghost Trail

The Critics’ Week running parallel to the illustrious festival opened last night with French director Jonathan Millet’s slow-burn thriller Ghost Trail (Les Fantômes). In it, Hollywood’s favourite young Arab actors Adam Bessa (Extraction) and Tawfeek Barhom (The First Omen) – both returning to Cannes after a successful 2022 edition with Harka and Cairo Conspiracy, respectively – find themselves in a suspense-packed toe-to-toe.

After losing his wife and daughter in the war, Syrian Hamid (Bessa) has managed to gain a foothold in Europe. A cloak-and-dagger initiative leads him to border town Strasbourg, where a number of survivors suspect one of their former oppressors (Barhom) to reside. Without alerting to his own presence, Hamid must find a way to confirm the war criminal’s identity and decide whether to trust an international court to seek justice – or turn to vigilantism.

Even as it is made up of familiar elements of a classic spy story, Ghost Trail operates at the contained pace commonly associated with European arthouse cinema. The personal struggles that launch the covert operation are given equal weight as the actual intelligence work, entrenching the fact that leaving the scene of a war doesn’t mean escaping it. With his considerate treatment, Millet manages to make a case for the significance of the genre in respect to global crises, without sacrificing its entertainment value.

The cinematography offers elaborate framing of faces half-covering each other in conversation and selectively draws attention to what remains hidden from the camera, the audience’s imagination of the horror more powerful than anything that could be shown.

While performances are solid throughout the feature, through a carefully crafted build-up of anticipation, the scene in which Bessa and Barhom’s characters meet face to face for the first time offers a nail-bitingly tense, culminating showdown of the two exceptional talents.

Blending the sensitivities of independent film with the mainstream appeal of espionage thriller, Ghost Trail offers an inspired and lingering viewing experience.

Selina Sondermann

Ghost Trail does not have a UK release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Cannes Film Festival 2024 coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Cannes Film Festival website here.

Watch the trailer for Ghost Trail here: