Critic Reviews

As is customary in Mr. Desplechin’s work, there’s a lot of dialogue in Ismael’s Ghosts, but this movie’s nerve endings vibrate most avidly and tenderly in scenes where not a word is spoken.

Desplechin has frequently acknowledged his debt to psychoanalysis in general and Lacan specifically, but never had he dared plunge as deeply into the mysteries of the psyche as he does here. [Cannes Version]

Desplechin delivers with flying colours thanks to an excellent cast and a sometimes serious, sometimes funny story that never lets up or becomes predictable. [Cannes Version]

This is filmmaking that demands to be noticed, if not always trusted.

The use of both dialogue and film language is sophisticated; sometimes Ismael’s Ghosts borders on overripe melodrama, while at other times it relies on genre tropes but then gives them an unexpected twist. [Cannes Version]

The movie before us may be far from perfect, but with some crucial narrative and thematic tissue restored, it plays much more clearly, and satisfyingly, as an evocation of Ismael's emotional and psychological rupture, in his life as well as his art.

Ismael’s Ghosts drops a number of seemingly disparate ingredients into a stew that ends up coalescing into a satisfying treat, full of surprises and flavors you wouldn’t expect.

Arnaud Desplechin’s latest simultaneously collapses and expands his entire body of work, reflexively revealing its many layers, like a pop-up book.

I’ve seen Ismael’s Ghosts twice, and both times I got the feeling that I was missing something. The film feels very personal, as if writer/director Arnaud Desplechin were sorting out his thoughts, processes and demons onscreen.

Even coming from a filmmaker who walks a narrative line like a drunk driver tipsily failing to prove his sobriety, this is scattershot stuff—and maybe too much movie for one movie. Yet it’s been made with enough brio and confidence to drag a chaos-tolerant viewer along for the ride. You want to relent to its winding navigation as fully as the director himself has surrendered the wheel to his muse.