Hold Me Tight

This movie is great: it gathers a lot of intensity and power that go through the spectator. Mathieu Amalric in the directing did an extraordinaire work: the plot, the shots, the editing...real great stuff.

He created a movie that deserves a lot of credit. It's common to find a film that has a great story and an ambitious use of the skills to tell the story itself.

Don't miss it!

I don't write reviews at all but in this case I wanted to share my experience. I watched this movie twice and I think it's extremely hard to catch everything in first round. And partially that's the beauty of this movie. Second round closed the circle for me. There's so many nimble moments I missed and revealed.

It is one of the most underrated movies I ve seen.

I understand that sometimes it's hard to find time to watch a movie let alone twice. I found it so rewarding in this case.

Im wondering how many people really understood this movie.

Beautiful, sad, hard, Life. Masterpiece.

9,5 / 10.

Hold Me Tight, directed by Mathieu Amalric, opens with Clarisse, a woman who seems to make a sudden, baffling decision. She wakes early, tidies the house, and quietly leaves, abandoning her husband and two children as they sleep. Panic sets in when her family realizes she's not coming back, and questions loom over her disappearance. Amalric's unconventional structure begins to reveal itself as we follow Clarisse's journey in a hazy, fragmented timeline that blurs the boundaries of reality and fantasy, leaving us uncertain about the truth.

From early on, we sense that something isn't quite right with Clarisse. She confronts a stranger, accusing him of mistreating her son, and then, strangely, applies fish-market ice to her face. These moments are surreal yet grounded, gradually revealing how Hold Me Tight plays with the very fabric of time and memory. Amalric masterfully guides us through a narrative that jumps across time, space, and even Clarisse's own imagination. As scenes transition lyrically between what's real and what might not be, a deeper, darker truth emerges, reshaping our understanding of her departure.

The film's driving force is Vicky Krieps' deeply nuanced performance as Clarisse, whose portrayal becomes even more compelling as the layers of her story unravel. By the time we reach the film's midpoint, we're able to confront her situation more directly, and Amalric's fragmented narrative begins to come into clearer focus. In the end, Hold Me Tight is an exploration of grief and longing that resists conventional interpretation, inviting us instead into a complex, hauntingly beautiful meditation on loss.

Grief is a compelling theme in cinema. Indeed, it's a subject that is persistently explored in the arts - grief is inevitable, all-encompassing and unforgiving: it is intertwined with time, and can only be experienced in time. But what version of time is commonly associated or portrayed with grief, but a linear one? In Serre moi fort (2021) by actor-turned director-Mathieu Amalric (you may know him from his performances in Le scaphandre et le papillon and The Grand Budapest Hotel), there is a singular subversion of this trend, and though non-linear time as a concept has been around awhile now, in cinematic language, in this masterfully done work, it has appeared anew, and so we arrive at an unconventionality.

"Serre moi fort" or "Hold Me Tight", adapted from an unpublished play by Claudine Galea, tells the story of a woman, played by the phenomenal Vicky Krieps (is it a coincidence?), recounting her departure from her family... or does it? The film's description suggests as much. Without revealing too much and risking spoilers, I can say that the description aptly encapsulates the essence of "Serre moi fort", and more broadly, the central conflict of the art form itself, which lies in its mysteries, riddles, puzzles, and the struggle for definition - in this case, the definition of grief.

Grief can be seen as a state, a reaction, or a series of reactions to loss. And what is loss but an event that has occurred? In cinema, and in real life too, loss is perceived as something that has passed. Even though this is our usual perception, the true expression of grief is never fully captured - we may cry, we may scream, we may categorize it into stages, but the internal experience is not easily discernible, if at all. I believe that films have the potential to portray grief as something diverse: a variable, so to speak. This is what "Serre moi fort" has achieved to perfection, in my view: through experimenting with filmic sequencing, it is able to present grief as a malady that may lessen in symptomatic intensity over time but resurfaces, again and again, in tender moments, in lucid desperation of a long day. "Serre moi fort" also depicts grief as hallucinations, delusions, and projections, working similarly to nostalgia in enabling you to revisit the past, modify it, and learn from it. It is unreasonably visual, seen through the inner eye - which, perhaps, the medium of film can best convey to us.

So long as one knows grief and has grief, like Clarisse does.

Mathieu Amalric's new movie is another (very) beautiful piece of work, piece of art. It is full of intelligence and subtle emotions ; sound and footage are brilliantly edited. All actors are delivering great performances, especially Vicky Krieps. She's more than gifted, she's breathtaking. Irresistible. The movie lingers in your head for quite a while after you've watched and "felt" it...