Jonathan Millet' s debut feature is a powerful, tense film. The opening film of Critics' Week at the last Cannes Film Festival, Les Fantômes is due to hit French cinemas on July 3, 2024. The story is the very real one of a courageous band of exiled Syrians who track downformer torturers of Bashar al-Assad's regime, hiding in France and elsewhere in the world under false identities.
Hamid(Adam Bessa, implacable and impeccable) is one of the members of this secret organization. He himself is on the hunt for the war criminal who put him through hell in Saidnaya prison. Although he was blindfolded during the abuse, he's certain he'll be able to recognize him by voice and smell. Although he's a shadow of his former self, his hunt takes him all the way to Strasbourg, where he's certain he recognizes his tormentor, Harfaz(Tawfeek Barhom), in the guise of a model university student.
Filmed like a true spy movie, The Phantoms avoids graphic horror, preferring instead harrowing voice-over narratives recorded on a tape recorder by young male victims of these deranged men, detailing the brutality, humiliation and corporal punishment they endured. Likewise, the members of the organization remain, for the most part, invisible in the image, their exchanges being reduced to vocal conversations set against a backdrop of Call of Duty games.
Although the pace is calm and the narration measured, leaving room for Hamid's growing emptiness, the suspense builds dangerously until a breathless face-off between the victim and his possible executioner in a Strasbourg snack bar. This secret brigade may have no real authority, but its cause is highly legitimate. Not to avenge the victims, even if the idea crosses some people's minds, but to get these war criminals duly convicted, while avoiding using the same weapons as them.
