Kristen Stewart could have spent the years after Twilight accepting safe Hollywood roles and appearing in enormous films where somebody tells her to stare at a green screen while the world explodes behind her. But she has chosen to stick with haunted women, psychological discomfort and stories that sound downright spooky. I suppose that’s a commitment you can respect.
Stewart is reuniting with French filmmaker Olivier Assayas for a new supernatural film titled Spiritual World. She will play Ada, a clairvoyant young woman plagued by mysterious premonitions. So yes, things are already looking wonderfully unsettling. Vicky Krieps, Riley Keough, Wagner Moura, Niels Schneider and Barbara Sukowa will join her in the cast. Filming is expected to take place in France and Germany between February and April 2027. A release date is yet to be announced. Cineuropa
This will be Stewart’s third film with Assayas. The pair first worked together on Clouds of Sils Maria in 2014, followed by Personal Shopper in 2016. If you have watched the latter, the description of Spiritual World may sound slightly familiar. In Personal Shopper, Stewart played Maureen. A young woman working for a celebrity in Paris while attempting to communicate with the spirit of her dead twin brother. The key elements included grief, text messages from an unknown sender and the sort of quiet tension that makes everyone a suspect.
Spiritual World will apparently return Assayas to similar supernatural territory. But reports have also described it as a steamier variation of Personal Shopper. Now this raises several questions that I assume the film will answer in its own time. Or perhaps it will simply give us more questions and leave them standing quietly in a dark corridor.
Either option feels possible.
But the casting makes sense because Stewart is very good at playing people who appear calm while complication runs the show under the surface. She has a particular talent for making silence feel active. You can watch her character stand in a room and somehow know that she is thinking about seven uncomfortable things at once. And I would just like to say that quality did not always receive much appreciation during the Twilight years.
Because for a long time, people treated Stewart’s performance as Bella Swan as proof that she could only look uncomfortable and avoid eye contact. But look a little deeper. You will notice that once the franchise ended, she began choosing films that used those same qualities in far more interesting ways.
She played Princess Diana in Spencer. Jean Seberg in Seberg . And a gym manager pulled into a rather violent romance in Love Lies Bleeding. She also appeared in the underwater horror film Underwater, where she spent most of the story running from enormous sea creatures while wearing very little protective equipment. Again, I respect the commitment.
I think Stewart’s career has become unpredictable in the best possible way. She moves between independent dramas, horror, biographical films and projects that are difficult to describe without sounding as though you are explaining a dream. Hollywood often expects actors who become famous through major franchises to spend the rest of their careers searching for another one. Stewart did almost the opposite. She used the freedom that came with Twilight to find stranger work.
And therein lies the reason Spiritual World feels like such a natural choice.
This is not simply an actor returning to a director who previously gave her good material. Stewart and Assayas seem interested in the same type of unease. Their characters move through stylish spaces while loneliness, grief and something possibly supernatural follow closely behind them.
The new cast makes the project even more interesting. Riley Keough has already proved that she can handle emotionally complicated stories, while Vicky Krieps can make a polite conversation feel as though it contains a hidden threat. Add Wagner Moura and Barbara Sukowa, and we have quite a collection of people who know how to make silence uncomfortable.
Of course, we still know very little about the actual plot. Ada is haunted, she can see things other people cannot and she receives mysterious premonitions. That could lead to a ghost story, a psychological drama or two hours of Kristen Stewart wondering whether someone else in the room is alive.
I would probably watch all three.
More importantly, Spiritual World continues the most interesting part of Stewart’s post-Twilight career. She has never seemed desperate to make audiences forget where she came from. She simply kept choosing projects that gave them something else to remember.
So no, Kristen Stewart did not escape one supernatural franchise only to avoid ghosts forever.
She just found stranger ones.
