At the 2024 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, there was a break-out film from the Critics’ Week section. A feature fiction debut, Jonathan Millet’s prize-winning Ghost Trail (Les fantômes) is another kind of thriller – methodical over messy, small chess moves and thinking of the longterm over impatient actions. The Music Box Films folks open the film theatrically in New York on Friday, May 30 at Film at Lincoln Center followed by a national expansion. In the clip below, we find Adam Bessa a bit closer than arm’s length in terms of distance to what might be the perceived enemy (a Tawfeek Barhom who arrives from this year’s Cannes with the Palme d’Or short as a filmmaker). Punctuated by the score by electronic musician Yuksek carries a weighted atmospheric browbeat aire.
Inspired by true events, two years after being released from a Syrian jail, Hamid (breakout star Adam Bessa) is making ends meet as a construction worker in the French city of Strasbourg, where, haunted by the memory of his imprisonment, the young man searches tirelessly for the man who tortured him, determined to get his revenge.