'Hold Me Close' REVIEW: More Surface, Less Substance
'Hold Me Close' REVIEW: More Surface, Less Substance
Carlo Aquino as Woody and Julia Barretto as Lynlyn / Still taken from Hold Me Close’s trailer
Set in the picturesque town of Karasu in Japan, Jason Paul Laxamana’s entry for this year’s Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF) centers around the fateful meeting of two Filipino immigrants, Woody (Carlo Aquino) and Lynlyn (Julia Barretto), with the latter possessing a magical ability to glimpse fragments of the future. Through physical touch, Lynlyn can sense whether a person will bring pain — a ‘negative’ — or happiness — a ‘positive’ — in her life, a gift that both guides and complicates her relationships.
Woody has been searching for the “perfect home” around the world when he met Lynlyn selling at the market with her siblings, Botbot (Migo Valid) and Tantan (Jairus Aquino), who both act as her protector from ‘negative’ people. When Lynlyn first touched Woody, he was neither ‘positive’ nor ‘negative' but rather someone ‘neutral’ — someone who would add nothing of value to her life in the foreseeable future. Intrigued by this anomaly, Woody sees Lynlyn’s prediction as a challenge to prove that he deserves a place in her heart. Lynlyn, in turn, is drawn to Woody in ways she cannot fully explain.
Woody and Lynlyn pictured against the mountains and meadows of Karasu, Japan / Still taken from Hold Me Close’s MMFF trailer
As they cross paths, it becomes clear that it’s Woody’s unwavering persistence that pulls them together. Despite Lynlyn’s initial indifference, Woody’s efforts begin to break down her walls. A montage shows them wandering through the cold yet tranquil landscapes of Karasu while they prance around in their wardrobe of reds, yellows, and blues, which at times make it feel like a curated tourism ad instead. The development of their relationship feels abrupt as they barely know each other for days, with transitions jumping from one sequence to the next. Their sparked connection is forced as if the film is only eager to push the plot forward without giving space for the characters’ relationship to unfold naturally, only relying on generic scores and run-of-the-mill rom-com scenes we’ve all seen in the past decade.
Mostly lacking organic buildup, Hold Me Close struggles to make audiences root for Woody and Lynlyn, with the latter’s ability feeling like an uninspired and unconvincing take on scenes from well-known anime, such as when Eren touches Hystoria and sees his future memories in Attack on Titan or when Mirai Sasaki’s Foresight quirk in My Hero Academia allows him to see the future when he touches and makes eye contact with his target. Premonition aside, it basically tries to emulate the magic realism in Makoto Shinkai’s works — whether that’s intentional or not — and even the atmosphere captured by the resurgence of Filipino films set in Japan, but it’s void of any emotional depth to give some semblance of narrative cohesion.
Lynlyn (Julia Barretto) with her siblings, Botbot (Migo Valid) and Tantan (Jairus Aquino) / Still taken from Hold Me Close’s MMFF trailer
The film then attempts to address trauma, but in a manner that feels shallow and reductive, essentially reducing complex experiences to the notion that one should simply forgive and move on without taking into account the real, lifelong impact of abuse. It also implies that Woody has some sort of obsessive-compulsive tendency since he’s throwing away items or running away from places he deems ‘ruined’, but it’s done like a caricature that it undermines the real struggles of people living with OCD, reducing a serious mental health issue to a punchline.
Adding to the irony, Lynlyn’s demand for Woody to “get consent” before touching her feels hypocritical when she’s been touching him without permission right from the start. Meanwhile, a scene filled with Woody’s self-pitying cry of “Walang magmamahal sa’kin hanggang sa mamatay ako!” (“No one will love me until I die!”) after he becomes a ‘negative’ to Lynlyn lands as overblown melodrama rather than genuine vulnerability as he screams out of cringe desperation.
Lynlyn and Woody sitting apart in a tree planter bench / Still taken from Hold Me Close’s MMFF trailer
In the end, the film awkwardly inserts a dramatic plot twist that feels like a hollow shot at foreshadowing why Woody became a ‘negative’ to Lynlyn. It's so poorly executed that it fails to deliver any gut punch or resonance. The attempt to surprise the audience falls flat, leaving the twist feeling like an afterthought rather than a significant arc in the story. Hold Me Close could have stood a chance as a Wattpad fan fiction in the 2010s but it unfortunately squanders its potential to explore the intersection of fate and personal choice, leaving audiences with surface-level concepts and underdeveloped characters that even Julia Barretto’s and Carlo Aquino’s acting chops couldn’t save if they tried.
Hold Me Close is one of the film entries for the Metro Manila Film Festival 2024, running from December 25, 2024 to January 14, 2025 in select cinemas nationwide.
