Pain – whether physical or emotional – is unpleasant, and many of us understandably spend our entire lives trying to avoid it. Lynlyn (Julia Barretto) has an ability that makes this easier – when she touches a person, she can determine if that person will have a positive or negative impact on her life. She meets Woody (Carlo Aquino), an eccentric who has moved to Lynlyn’s hometown in Karatsu, Saga Prefecture and takes a liking to him. All is well until she touches him and she gets an ominous premonition…
In Karatsu there exists a pine grove called Niji no Matsubara (虹の松原, Pine Grove of Rainbows), a pine forest planted by a feudal lord who lived in Karatsu in the early Edo period. It was a natural barrier, meant by the people who planted it to protect the city from strong winds and rain. But the forest is not an impenetrable barrier, and as such it does not stop everything from passing through; some winds and rain still make their way to Karatsu. Hold Me Close is a love story that tells us not to close our hearts to pain; that pain is an inevitability of loving, because love does not last forever.
It’s certainly an interesting premise, and in theory it’s something I can get behind. What prevents Hold Me Close from being any good lies in the details. For one, the dialogue is all sorts of weird and off putting. Lynlyn switches being warm and friendly to being robotic, and it’s not Julia Barretto’s fault as I think she’s a good actress. Woody, on the other hand, feels like an emotionally draining obsessive who is so desperate for love, he doesn’t care where that love may come from. He’s not exactly the kind of guy I can root for, and I didn’t find any chemistry in their pairing because of that.
Despite its capable technical aspects, Hold Me Close is more egregiously written than Barretto’s 2019 collab with director Jason Paul Laxamana, Between Maybes, which also takes place in Japan. This one outright leans into an obsessive love for Japanese culture, as if it was written by a weeb or an overly zealous otaku. The various Japanese phrases inserted in the dialogue are cringe, and during one moment where Lynlyn is attacked, her cries of tasukete (help me!) are reflected in the subtitles as “tasukete,” as if MMFF audiences will pick that up. It honestly felt like watching an anime fansub from 2005, and I do not mean that positively because it takes place during a very serious scene.
Though it has some potential, Hold Me Close didn’t hold up to expectations. がっかりだよ。
