Ada sees things before they happen, and she cannot stop seeing them. Kristen Stewart will play her in Spiritual World, which reunites her with Olivier Assayas for the first time in a decade and puts the two of them back inside a ghost story.
Riley Keough, Vicky Krieps, Wagner Moura, Barbara Sukowa and Niels Schneider round out the cast. Olivier Delbosc produces through the Paris outfit Curiosa Films with ARTE France co-financing, and the shoot runs February through April 2027 across France and Germany, which puts it well past anything currently dated on our 2027 release calendar. Variety reported the casting.
The Third Assayas Film for Stewart
They made Clouds of Sils Maria in 2014, and Stewart’s work in it made her the first American actress to win a César. Two years later came Personal Shopper, in which she played a medium working in Paris and waiting for her dead twin brother to send her a sign. Assayas shared Best Director at Cannes for it, with Cristian Mungiu.
Spiritual World is billed as a steamier Personal Shopper. What that film actually did was take its premise seriously enough to stage a real séance, shoot an apparition head-on, and still leave the audience unsure at the end whether anything supernatural had happened. A director who is willing to do that twice is worth the wait.
The Cast Carries More Horror Than the Logline Suggests
Keough spent A24’s It Comes at Night in a house organized around a sealed red door. Krieps aged to death on a beach in M. Night Shyamalan’s Old. Sukowa has been working since Fassbinder. Schneider and Krieps both come out of European auteur cinema rather than genre, which is the register Assayas tends to cast in anyway.
Moura is the newest name on the list and the hottest. He won Best Actor at Cannes last year for The Secret Agent and went on to become the first Brazilian ever nominated for the Best Actor Oscar. He has not done much horror. He has done a great deal of paranoia, which for this kind of film is closer to the same skill.
A February 2027 start means there is nothing to watch for a long time, and no distributor has been named for the United States. Assayas has been directing for forty years and has made exactly one ghost story in all of them, which is the reason to pay attention to the second.
