Critic Reviews

It’s a juicy piece of entertainment that also engages sincerely with its painful, topical subject matter.

Millet’s expertly tooled movie is far from the first to derive its moral stakes from the desire to find some measure of redress for the victims and survivors of political violence, but it is among the best to also crossbreed this familiar archetype with the urgency and topicality of the Syrian refugee crisis.

Ghost Trail is an intimate study of trauma that plays with the gripping suspense of a globetrotting spy thriller.

Ghost Trail is a film that refuses to let anyone treat the plight of Syrians like a thing of the past, or to delude themselves into thinking that the war ends once Syrians are relocated to safer countries.

While the thriller element remains compelling, it is ultimately eclipsed by the gripping focus on a man haunted by the past.

Mr. Bessa’s performance is a pained and bitter thing, his character committed to some form of justice even if the attempt to get it keeps him submerged in a traumatic past.

The movie sweeps ambitiously across Europe and the Middle East and shows us a complex world of pain.

Ghost Trail leaves a lasting impression, especially from its redemptive ending where choices are made to reward the audience’s emotional and moral investment. The film communicates a sense of hope for a displaced people, a roadmap to the future, the possibility of absolution.

The cat-and-mouse game, which involves Hamid tracking his suspect throughout campus, plays out in a relatively low-key manner, with the film relying on Bessa (and eventually, an eerie Barhom) to deepen the survivor’s dilemma.

It studiously documents the various ways that Hamid makes his case, even though there’s never that much depth to the character beyond his cloak-and-dagger maschinations and a pressing desire for justice.