Ismael's Ghosts

This film is a stinker. The premise seems interesting enough - a woman disappeared 20 years earlier, the husband and family not sure if she was dead. Other than that, the film goes downhill fast. The plot is boring, and the film jumps around to various sub-plots. The dialog is bad - the characters speak in a way that you shake your head and say "Who speaks like that in real life?" Not sure if it's a translation issue, but this seems to be consistent throughout the movie. It's basically a movie about the dialog, not so much the weak, unbelievable story. You really don't care about the characters. To add to the torture, the movie is over 2 hours long, so the suffering is extended. Avoid it like the plague.

What did I watch? What was it about? It's an incomprehensible, tiring mess, unbearably boring, especially towards the end. I wished I could see any meaning in this crap.

My vote: 1/10.

I suppose I'm lucky in the sense that unlike the other reviewers on here, I didn't pay to watch this film in a theater, but streamed it on Hulu. I approached it with high hopes since the title and brief synopsis seemed promising, but as the film went on I would get more and more disappointed. I thought the main character's film and his writing would just remain a side plot rather than eventually consume the whole thing. I was much more interested in learning about this long lost wife and his past relationship with her, but instead the movie just goes a million directions at once. We certainly learn about "les fantomes d'Ismaël" but are still left lost as to why they're there in the first place or why any of them matter more than the plot about the wife ?! Honestly this is a film that even pretentious hipsters won't have the right to say that they understood, because the film is a hot mess. Yes it may have some solid French talent in the cast, but their gifts went to waste due to a tangled storyline that never exactly gets detangled. I'm a fan of French films, but this one is just not good, sorry to say.

As many have said, the premise of this film is very good, but it is lost in a mess of structure that would shame must university film society. It is a number of stories within a story, which lose momentum as the film continues. The main plot is the sudden reappearance of a film maker's wife after an absence of 21 years, but this is submerged by unnecessary interludes.

I watched the film at the French Film Festival in Sydney, and throughout the film people trickled out, not returning. What kept me was the excellent acting as ever from Cotillard and Gainsbourg, but you honestly wonder why and how they signed up for such a messy screenplay.

If this film was a blind date, it would talk erratically at you for nearly two hours, then leave abruptly for no reason. Avoid.

I watched the whole film, but still have no idea what the story is about. The film starts off interesting, but becomes increasingly disjointed as time goes on. I cannot understand what it is about towards the end.