Ghostly shadows drape Kristen Stewart drama ‘Personal Shopper’

It’s hard to be sure exactly what’s happening in Olivier Assayas’ elusive, shadowy drama “Personal Shopper” — and that is, of course, the point. Kristen Stewart (so good in Assayas’ previous film, “Clouds of Sils Maria”) plays Maureen, a young American in Paris whose habitual quiet masks a terrible loss — the recent death of her twin brother, Lewis.

She works as a personal shopper to a celebrity (Nora von Waldstatten), spending her days dutifully schlepping garment bags and choosing belts and purses. When night falls, her attention turns to her true avocation: as a “ghost whisperer” who attempts to contact the spirits of the dead; notably, her lost brother. “What are you doing in Paris?” someone asks her. “I’m … waiting,” she replies.

“Personal Shopper” is the kind of movie that gives its viewers space to explore the noises with which Maureen lives, and the silence in which she waits: the skriitch of hangers on a rack; the eerie, unexpected pulse of a Skype ringtone; the metallic tap of texting; the echoing thump of footsteps in a remote house where Maureen doesn’t know if she’s alone. And we see some ghostly visions — like smoke that momentarily hangs in the air, forming a shape — but, as in so many ghost stories, we don’t know if they’re real or a figment of Maureen’s imagination. (We learn that she, like her brother, has a weak heart; a doctor advises her to avoid “intense physical effort and extreme emotions.”)