‘Ghost Trail’ Review: Adam Bessa Electrifies a Tense Refugee Revenge Thriller

variety.com:

Jessica Kiang 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.