Ismael's Ghosts's reviews
Media reviews
The Hollywood Reporter
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.
Caimán Cuadernos de Cine
It's obvious that this polyhedral portrait is unstable and imperfect. But in the supposed imperfections resides the secret of the movie. It's as if Desplechin didn't look for anything else different than the "quality of the imperfection" to construct a work full of elipsis, changes of tone, rhythms ruptures, populated by several and overlapped narrative voices.
Caimán Cuadernos de Cine
The best moments of this extraordinarily intimal and personal film from the French director (...) are played in the capture of isolated gestures, in the radiography of the looks and the more intuitive movements of the characters, in the most free and heterodox moments of its passing. In the meantime, you can observe the portrait of a filmmaker in crisis assaulted by the ghost of his former lover and the creative ghosts that he carries with him, although it's not in the argument but in the textures and brush-strokes where the most valuable of the proposal resides.
El Mundo
The result ends up offering itself to the spectator as a maze as interesting as irregular; as unhinged as profound; as vibran as, at times, unbearable. All in one. The same director admits the origin of the movie are the thousand stories written in papers who fell down on the ground. There, in confusion, in fate, in simple chaos, they were born.
Indiewire
With so many audacious narrative ingredients on display, it?s unfortunate that the movie falls short of a satisfactory resolution. Instead, it heads into a series of overwrought showdowns that smooth out the various subplots in a tidy fashion.
Caimán Cuadernos de Cine
It's an imperfect work, profoundly unbalanced but in which stimulating ideas abound. Its intention to conjugate two narrative planes (which could be labeled as reality and fiction if it weren't because, skillfully, Desplechin avoids delimiting both territories clearly) is a source to not few imbalances and sudden changes in the rhythm, but in the end the coherence between both narrations is such that, in the end, accepting those ups and downs as an integral part of the proposition seems the most sensible thing to do.
The Telegraph
There is a self-consciously highbrow amusement to be had in feeling yourself settle in for a Polanski-like suspense thriller, a Hitchcockian mystery or a Bergmanesque psychological jigsaw puzzle, only for the film to shoo you out of this comfort zone five minutes later.
The Playlist
'Ismael's Ghosts' is a curiously in-the-moment watchable amalgam of all his best and worst tendencies: a film of so many different personalities it feels like several different films inexplicably spliced together.
Variety
'Ismael?s Ghosts' has something profound to say about the lingering pain of past relationships and the threat they still pose to the present, but it does so in such a needlessly complicated fashion.
The Guardian
Eventually Desplechin brings down the curtain on this increasingly chaotic nonsense, whose flicks of directionless fun do not justify its existence.
The Wrap
'Ishmael?s Ghosts' was never going to be one of the director?s most satisfying works, as it?s fundamentally about midlife rut. Without the thrill of the beginning or the catharsis of the end, the film spends a lot of energy on just grinding it out, spinning its wheels, and trying a number of genres on for size without any larger theme.
Screen Daily
None of this is presented in conventional linear fashion; the stories bounce around in time but are suspenseful and intriguing rather than confusing. An awful lot of separate strands are satisfyingly wrapped up before the closing credits roll.
Fotogramas