Afterlife: "Ghost Trail"

The taut new French film Ghost Trail maps the coolly paranoid spider's-web narratives of the 1970s onto the present day, and does something noteworthy with what we might call the agonised detachment of contemporary life: our sense something very bad is happening, just over there, at the limits of our gaze and reach, which we may ultimately be powerless to stop. Our protagonist is an intense, unsmiling young man, Hamid (Adam Bessa), first observed being dumped out of a truck in the desert. An onscreen graphic reveals one reason for his sombre mien: this is the Syria of 2014, and Hamid, a professor of literature in his former existence, is one of the many given reasons to flee the barbarism of the Assad regime. We rejoin him two years down the line, clean shaven though no less downcast, working a cash-in-hand gig at a construction site in Strasbourg, although this daily grind clearly occupies him far less than the mission that consumes his nights and days off: tracking down one Sami Hanna, a fellow ex-pat somehow connected to the period Hamid spent behind bars back in Aleppo. What Hamid plans to do with him once identified is unclear, though it seems unlikely this reunion will be an altogether happy one.

What this quest initially prompts, however, is another of the movies' occasional exercises in looking and watching. Our peeper-hero collects intelligence, identifies possible suspects, tracks their movements across town; and as we walk several miles in his shoes and begin to see the world through his eyes, we're nudged first to consider anew the plight of those displaced and traumatised by conflict, and then to reckon with what exactly is going on inside this one refugee's head. Within these supremely well-organised frames, director Jonathan Millet (who also co-writes, with Florence Rochat and Sara Wikler) starts to separate out two distinct planes of looking. In the foreground, there is so-called normal life: folks in coffee shops and libraries, joggers in the park, the city's annual Christmas market. In the background, tuned out by most: the looker-lurker and his oblivious quarry, unfinished business, a nagging loose end from another time and place. What Ghost Trail describes above all else is one horribly isolated life, the kind where obsession can easily set in, abetted in this instance by what Hamid insists in putting in his eyes and ears. He spends his downtime listening to statements setting out what his quarry is alleged to have done back in Syria, words and deeds so heavy they begin to weigh down and smother any good news that comes our guy's way; he's either psyching himself up to strike or torturing himself.

One of Millet's tactics is to deny us the certainty and clarity his protagonist is seeking. The intelligence that comes Hamid's way is fitful and patchy, sometimes contradictory: the Sami Hanna he begins to tail (Tawfeek Barhom) could be the wrong man, or a different wrongdoer, or just the sort of blank who invites intense projection. (A chance encounter in a cramped cafe suggests he may, in fact, be a wise elder and repository of friendly advice - which doesn't rule out any of the above possibilities.) Bessa's largely internalised performance isn't giving anything away for free, except that even Hamid has reason to doubt and rage and grieve; a quasi-romantic interlude with a fellow refugee (Hala Rajab) gestures to what they've both lost and know they'll never get back. (The film's original French title Les fantômes underlines how this community is stuck in limbo, caught between past and present, one place and another.) Yet the watching and waiting lends the film an inbuilt suspense and unease, and every stylistic choice knits together: the analogue stalking cuts well with footage of a Call of Duty-style game Hamid plays as a release valve, while the muted palette chimes with the notional Sami's remark that "France isn't bad, but it lacks colour... everything's grey". Millet lets his characters lead him - the final reel carries us to Berlin, Beirut, Paris, the ends of the earth - yet this extended stakeout puts us so deeply in Hamid's battered shoes and psyche that Ghost Trail starts to make last week's The Long Walk seem a relative stroll in the park. (The difference, perhaps, between first world problems and everywhere else's.) At the very least, Millet's film proves a potent illustration of the very French notion of dérangement, centred on a figure knocked so far from the straight and narrow we've given cause to wonder if he'll ever regain sure footing.

Ghost Trail opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.