Watching the struggles of Syrian refugees in Western Europe isn’t everyone’s idea of fun, so how about a spy thriller instead? That seems to be the idea behind Ghost Trail, which manages to have it both ways – the miseries of a life in exile and the thrill of the chase as its hero chases down his quarry.
It’s quite John Le Carré in many respects, with the focus on a Syrian refugee who is part of a network tracking down the people who tortured and killed back in the home country. In Zoom calls with his mother, who is in the Bekaa refugee camp in Beirut, Hamid pretends that he’s in Berlin, has a good job and a girlfriend. Everything, he tells her, is going fine. In fact he’s living a loner’s existence in Strasbourg in France where he’s trying to find the guy who tortured him in Sednaya prison. In other Zoom calls with other members of the network, it’s clear that Hamid has gone slightly rogue on this one.
After many fruitless conversations with other refugees, most of whom are wary of saying anything at all – Bashar al-Assad is still in power and his men are everywhere – Hamid gets a lead. A youngish student at a university. Normal looking, handsome even. The tension here: is the fragile Hamid going to fall apart before he can definitively identify Harfaz as the perp? Is Harfaz actually the right person in the first place?
Debut feature director Jonathan Millet shapes his film as a series of meetings. The Zoom meetings with his mother or the network, meetings on a park bench with a German spy contact called Nina – very trad – meetings with the French authorities who either want to get Hamid into gainful employment or eject him from the country. Eventually, in the film’s standout moments, an accidental meeting with Harfaz at a student cafeteria. Is it really accidental though? Tense, very tense, with the suggestion suddenly that the hunter has become the hunted.
Along the way we learn personal details and are given an insight into lives destroyed by war. Hamid is a professor of literature, it turns out, though of course that life is now a million miles away. Yara, A Syrian woman he meets, who looks like she might be more than just a passing acquaintance, is a trained doctor, and now works in a launderette. These little revelations are all the more forceful because they’re just dropped in, in passing.
Millet makes interesting artistic decisions. The Zoom meetings with the network are always accompanied by images from a shoot-em-up game. We never see the faces of the other members of the group, anonymity being key, but it’s a reminder that this is war by other means. The score by Yuksek, which is disorientating and fingernails-down-the-blackboard edgy. The constant contrasting of breezy everyday life – kids playing in the park – with the darker, driven mindset of Hamid. When Hamid makes an off-the-books trip to Beirut, and the camera wanders into the Bekaa camp where his mother lives, Millet resists the urge to make it a pity party. In a key scene set in another cafeteria, while standing in a queue with Harfaz, Hamid leans forward just a touch and sniffs him.
In some respects it’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, with Adam Bessa a superbly haunted update on Richard Burton. The other characters will read across too, but let’s not overdo it – Tawfeek Barhom makes a beautifully ambiguous Harfaz, Hala Rajab a downcast and broken Yara, Julia Franz Richter the German contact Nina.
All in all, a film that educates, entertains and delivers an emotional connection to an existence most of us will thankfully never experience.
Ghost Trail – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
