Adam Bessa Electrifies a Tense Refugee Thriller

If the best revenge is living well, it is a truism that has not yet taken root for Hamid (a riveting Adam Bessa), the dark, scarred heart of Jonathan Millet‘s brooding, gripping “Ghost Trail.” Outside his soon-to-be-revealed mission, Hamid barely has a life at all, placing him firmly in the genre tradition of the taciturn, traumatized hero whose obsessive pursuit of his quarry leaves little room for anything beyond the constant, careful stoking of his rage, grief and survivor’s guilt. Millet’s expertly tooled movie is far from the first to derive its moral stakes from the desire to find some measure of redress for the victims and survivors of political violence, but it is among the best to also crossbreed this familiar archetype with the urgency and topicality of the Syrian refugee crisis. 

Even while the screen is still black as the opening credits unfurl, the narrative (co-written by Millet and Florence Rochat) begins to bite: The noise we hear is muffled but unmistakably that of too many frightened humans crammed into too small a space, being joltingly driven somewhere against their will. The transport lurches to a halt and searing light spills in as this truckload of bruised, barely living prisoners, Hamid among them, is frogmarched at gunpoint into the desert. The Syrian soldiers leave them there to die. But Hamid, or a slender but tenacious shadow of the guy Hamid used to be, somehow does not. 

Two years later, he is living a solitary life in Strasbourg, despite his papers being processed for asylum in Germany. Initially, we can’t be sure just what his agenda is. But the dead-drop meetings he has with his handler Nina (Julia Franz Richter), his furtive online chats with other “agents” via a multiplayer videogame during which their avatars wander through rubble-strewn cityscapes picking off opponents, and his trawling of local refugee shelters looking for leads on a guy he claims unconvincingly is his cousin, make us understand that it is illicit and dangerous. So much so that during weekly zooms for which he dresses up in a rented shirt and jacket, he lies to his mother, who is in a camp in Beirut, claiming to be safely studying in Berlin. 

In fact, Hamid is part of a self-organizing collective scouring Europe for escaped Syrian war criminals. He is on the trail of Harfaz, the man responsible for Hamid’s weekly torture sessions while he was imprisoned, during which time, the war claimed his wife and child. The rest of his network is concentrated in Germany, where they believe Harfaz has gone to ground, but Hamid has followed a lead to France, and becomes increasingly convinced that his sadistic tormentor — whose face he has never seen — has assumed the identity of Sami Hamma (Tawfeek Barhom), a chemistry postgrad at the city’s university. And so Hamid, who was formerly a literature professor in Aleppo, starts hanging about on campus, tailing his suspect and straying ever deeper into the gray area between the righteous search for justice and all-out vigilantism. 

Editor Laurent Sénéchal’s cutting is sharp and precise, while DP Olivier Boonjing frames the action with elegant dynamism, never resorting to shaky-cam or other artificial tension-enhancing tricks, the better to appreciate Bessa’s quiet intensity. Winner of the Un Certain Regard best performance award in 2022 for “Harka,” the French-Tunisian star here delivers a level of charisma that should see him promoted out of his sidekick role in the dour but effective “Extraction” movies.  And when it comes to an actual showdown, Barhom matches Bessa beat for beat, recalling great two-hander adversarial scenes (like in Michael Mann’s “Heat” or Steve McQueen’s ‘Hunger”) in which the words that are spoken are merely the visible part of the iceberg of all that is actually said.

Echoing Nazi-hunting thrillers such as “Marathon Man” and “The Boys From Brazil,” the conflict that backgrounds “Ghost Trail,” by contrast, is ongoing, which could make its more sensational aspects hard to swallow if the film did not also deliver a touching portrait of a man struggling to emerge from the shell shock of extreme loss. When Yara (Hala Rajab) the young Syrian woman he meets at a shelter asks him to call on her again, Hamid asks why, in blank confusion, as if the memory of such ordinary human things as flirtation and attraction has become, like poetry, like art, like culture and pleasure, a foreign language he no longer speaks. Such things are the stuff of living well, but in order for that to happen, one must first decide to live.