The Ghosts of Jonathan Millet: Our opinion and the trailer

It’s a powerful and tense film what sign Jonathan Millet with his first feature film. Opening film of the Critics’ Week of the last Cannes Film Festival, The ghosts is expected in French theaters on July 3, 2024. The story is that, very real, of a courageous band of exiled Syrians who stalkedformer torturers of the Bashar al-Assad regimehidden in France and elsewhere in the world under false identities.

Hamid (Adam Bessaimplacable and impeccable) is one of the members of this secret organization. He himself is in search of war criminal who made him go through hell in the Saidnaya prison. Although he was blindfolded during the abuse, he is certain: he will be able to recognize him by his voice, by his smell. If he is nothing more than a shadow of himself, his hunt nevertheless leads him as far as Strasbourg where he is certain to have recognized his executionerHarfaz (Tawfeek Barhom), in the guise of a model university student.

Filmed as a real spy movie, The ghosts avoids falling into graphic horror, preferring upsetting voice-over stories recorded on a tape recorder by young men who were victims of these derangements, detailing the brutality, humiliation and corporal punishment they suffered. Likewise, the members of the organization remain, for the most part, invisible in the image, their exchanges boiling down to vocal conversations against the backdrop of games of Call of Duty.

If the pace is calm and the measured narrationgiving way to the void that grows in Hamid, the suspense finished by climb dangerously up to one panting face-to-face between the victim and her possible executioner, in a Strasbourg snack bar. This secret brigade has, of course, no real authority but great legitimacy in its cause. Not that of avenging the victims, even if the idea crosses the minds of some, but of doing condemn these war criminals in due form, while avoiding using the same weapons as them.

The trailer for The Ghosts of Jonathan Millet: