TONE & STYLE
All Our Ghosts is a film that does not speak loudly. It does not explain. It does not reassure the viewer what to feel at any given moment. It is built on what happens between words and on what the characters do not say.
DIALOGUE
The primary reference is Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper, in which dialogue sounds like an overheard conversation, not a screenplay. Characters interrupt each other, do not finish sentences, and speak beside the subject to reach the point. The most important lines arrive in passing, in the car, in the bathroom, at a petrol station. Never at the moment the viewer expects. This dialogue trusts the actors and asks them to work with body, gaze and breath as strongly as with voice.
WOMEN'S RELATIONSHIP
The second key reference is Lisa Cholodenko's High Art, where the relationship between a photographer and a younger woman is artistic collaboration, desire and obsession at once. Eroticism is not a separate layer: it is woven into the work. When Ewa adjusts prints painted on Natasza's body, when they share a motel room and lie on beds in their underwear, there is always something more than work and less than love. Cholodenko showed us that female intimacy in the art world is complicated by power, age, class and talent. This film inherits that tradition.
ROAD MOVIE
The third reference is Ridley Scott's Thelma & Louise: two women in a car who leave for one thing and receive something completely different. All Our Ghosts adopts this escalation. Every stop raises the stakes and every night moves the women further from the point of return. But where Scott plays with genre and ends in spectacle, we go further: into a space where consequences are real and the finale is not catharsis but an open wound. Natasza returns to the country she fled. Ewa remains with an exhibition that cost her far too much.
MAGICAL REALISM
Maria's ghost and Putin's death are layers subtly woven into the whole story. Maria appears several times and each time the viewer is unsure whether she is really there. Putin dies on television on the night after the women accidentally kill Andriej. The film does not comment on these events. It shows them and moves on. The viewer connects the dots.
EMOTIONAL RHYTHM & TONE
The film breathes. After intense scenes come moments of suspension. These pauses are not breaks in the narrative. They are the narrative. It is in them that the relationship between Ewa and Natasza is born, and after them the later darkness strikes harder, until the women part.
