A street-lit trek through the eerily empty avenues and byways of a city at sleep, Bas Devos’s Ghost Tropic recalls such nocturnal urban odysseys as Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time. With an absurdist black humor, those films captured the paranoia of the city night, and Ghost Tropic’s premise—a middle-aged cleaning lady, Khadija (Saadia Bentaïeb), struggles to make her way home through the streets of Brussels after falling asleep on the metro and finding herself at the end of the line—is implicit with a similar air of danger. As a Muslim woman from Molenbeek, a neighborhood often vilified as a “terrorist hotbed,” the hijab-wearing Khadija potentially faces prejudice and peril at every turn. But while the film very subtly alludes to issues of Islamophobia, poverty, police violence, and the fear of immigrants, it’s overwhelmingly a work of quiet reflection.
In contrast to After Hours and Good Time, though, Ghost Tropic whips up a mood of pensive, slightly otherworldly calm. Khadija, with her wide eyes and languid mien, seems in no particular hurry to get home. She faces irritating setbacks (an overdrawn bank account, a bus that never leaves its terminus) but takes them in stride, at one point even going out of her way to call the paramedics to help an unresponsive homeless man (Guy Dermul) she encounters. The people she meets on her journey—mostly essential workers like nurses, policemen, a mall security guard (Stefan Gota), and a convenience store clerk (Maaike Neuville) locking up for the night—treat her with that peculiar mix of wariness and unassuming kindness that defines so many encounters with strangers when no one else is around.
Shot on radiantly grainy 16mm in a boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, the film is filled with gorgeously hushed shots of Brussels’s least glamorous locations, from hospitals to residential blocks to gas stations. Cinematographer Grimm Vandekerckhove’s inquisitive camera infuses these unassuming locals with a wondrous tranquility that highlights, for example, the ethereal ambient glow of street lamps reflecting off rain-soaked asphalt. Devos gives the audience ample space for contemplation, often allowing the camera to simply float down the street for minutes on end as Brecht Ameel’s gentle fingerstyle acoustic guitar score fills the air.
Around the film’s midpoint, a few more narrative threads emerge. Just as Khadija is about to arrive home, she catches her 17-year-old daughter (Nora Dari) drinking vodka in the park with friends. While Khadija is at first livid, tipping off the police that the neighborhood liquor store is selling alcohol to minors, the scene shifts into emotionally ambiguous terrain when Khadija spies on her daughter’s romantic interaction with a male friend. In this moment, Devos doesn’t spell out what exactly Khadija is feeling, as her face is at once relieved and heartbroken, perhaps reflective of the broad gulf between the mother and daughter’s values.
Though we only get glimpses of their lives, subtle clues about the nature of Khadija and her daughter’s relationship lie in Ghost Tropic’s enigmatic opening and closing shots. The first is a lengthy, static view of Khadija’s empty living room as dusk falls upon it, with the mother and daughter delivering enigmatic pronouncements in voiceover. Devis later mirrors this opening shot—only now with light filling the room as the sun rises—and we expect that the film will close on this neat little echo of its opening. Instead, the filmmaker abruptly cuts to a handheld shot of the daughter on a beach with her friends, ecstatically running toward the crystal-blue tropical waters. Though a jarring finish to this distinctly urban film, it hints at a parallel journey: While Khadija has spent the entirety of Ghost Tropic doing everything she can to get back home, her daughter has been yearning only to turn her back to it.
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