The best mysteries always maintain an air of… well, mystery about them. Propelled by the fear, pain, and panic of having all too many questions and too few answers, they possess a particular kind of tension which, when combined with a plot with the right amount of momentum, can make for a most riveting, disquieting story. Unfortunately, such cannot be said for Guillaume Nicloux’s Mi Amor. A filmmaker with some talent in both crime thrillers and psychological dramas, he’s here turned out a rather limp variation on both. Crucially, if its central mysteriousness is what keeps it engaging, it does so only to a point, after which it provides too many answers and becomes the kind of pedestrian schlock you’ve spent most of the movie hoping it wouldn’t be.
Romy (Pom Klementieff) is a successful DJ based in Paris, but frequently absent due to her work. Her teenage son lives with her mother, Kimi (Elina Löwensohn), as he has done since shortly after birth, when Romy was herself just a teen. Visiting the Canary Islands with her girlfriend, Chloé (Freya Mavor), she grows increasingly unsettled — first in the wake of hearing of Kimi’s illness, then by the peculiar welcome from the locals, and finally by a sudden disappearance and a string of further sinister events. Aided by club owner Vincent (Benoît Magimel), her isolation and frustration only intensify as she desperately seeks the truth in an unfamiliar place where everyone seems to be lying to her.
Nicloux and co-writer Nathalie Leuthreau’s scenario is a pretty unimaginative one, but the director’s sensitivity to the human condition keeps matters interesting, if never quite surprising. Romy and Vincent are drawn with nuance and compassion, and inhabited well by Klementieff and Magimel, and Nicloux touches upon notions of sympathy, kinship, abandonment, and disconnection between them and others with insight and honesty. Deep feelings are held for distant loved ones, tenuous bonds are developed between strangers, and past traumas cloud characters’ perceptions of present relationships — Romy addresses her mother by her given name, for example, and frequently denies the nature of her connection to Chloé. Some interactions pass with ease, other exchanges have a stilted tone, presumably intentional, that quietly amplifies the tension. Nicloux has a gentle, unforced directorial style that allows significant details such as these to register without emphasis, and provides his actors with the scope to deliver subtle yet impactful naturalistic performances.
Yet very little of this works as it ought to, and very much of that is due to the score. Composer Irène Drésel’s pounding electronic compositions drone through most of the movie’s scenes, aggressively directing toward an intensity not present in Nicloux’s air of calm (which is far more compelling and, importantly, far more unnerving). The music in Mi Amor never lets the movie rest, nor do individual scenes establish a mood of their own. It’s a near relentless signal to the nerves to be on edge, when the alternately plaintive and eerie stillness of Nicloux’s approach accomplishes this with considerably more persuasion (or it would, were it allowed to). It’s rare for a single element of a movie to sully it so greatly, yet this single element is so pervasive here that it could hardly not do so.
And then Nicloux sullies it all anyway, with a climactic sequence that nullifies whatever tension remained altogether. Explaining everything away, it’s a cheap, crude solution to a problem the movie never faced. There’s an unstressed note of mysticism here and there in Mi Amor, which, alongside the ever-more enraging uncertainties and obstacles Romy faces, creates a sense of creepiness — the terror of the unknown and the unknowable. That might have lingered, but Nicloux insists that nothing remains unknown, and the denouement he chooses is corny and deflating. It also racks up one too many easy outs for a movie that was already a little too heavy on them — heroic saves at the last minute, lucky chance encounters, and the baffling refusal of local law enforcement to entertain any of Romy’s complaints all stretch disbelief to the maximum.
The result is that Mi Amor is a mystery movie that ends up utterly unmysterious. It has its qualities, but it requires too much digging beneath rote B-movie plotting and an incessant musical score to make them worth the effort to find. Nicloux is a smart filmmaker — he has a strong handle on simple things, like a two-way dialogue exchange, and some more complex ones (the film has some of the most accurate cinematic depictions of modern clubbing in a long time). But he’s gone astray here, and the most mysterious thing about Mi Amor is how easy it would have been not to.
Published as part of IFFR 2026 — Dispatch 4.
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