Guillaume Nicloux has always known how to capture and isolate a particular kind of tourist unease. The sense of being somewhere unfamiliar, surrounded by people who understand the rules better than you do, where charm can curdle into threat without warning — Mi Amor is built on exactly that feeling, and for the most part it works extremely well.
Romy, played by Pom Klementieff in her first French film since building a Hollywood profile via the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, is a Paris-based DJ in the Canary Islands for a gig, travelling with her friend Chloé.
The Canary Islands setting is well chosen: a place with a split identity, sun-bleached and tourist-trampled on one level, and running on a different set of rules entirely underneath.
When Chloé vanishes the morning after Romy’s set and the local police respond with the weary indifference of people who’ve watched tourists do this before, Romy’s frustration hardens into something closer to dread. Aided by Vincent, a club owner with intimate knowledge of how the island actually operates, she pushes further into an underworld of petty criminality and deliberate evasion, trying to find answers that nobody seems willing to provide.
The film’s real subject, though, isn’t the investigation — it’s the texture of displacement. Klementieff is quietly excellent at conveying a particular kind of modern exhaustion: Romy sleeps badly, drinks nothing, and repeats a relaxation mantra to herself before bed with the hollow persistence of someone who has long since stopped believing it.
She keeps her mother at arm’s length, denies the nature of her relationship with Chloé, and holds most people at a distance that has apparently calcified into habit. When she’s forced to depend on a stranger in an unfamiliar place, the film finds its most interesting register — two people with complicated, half-buried histories forming a tentative connection out of shared necessity. Benoît Magimel brings real weight to Vincent, who is recognisably Nicloux’s territory: worn, worldly, capable of warmth and evasion in equal measure.
What works against the film is also what’s most notable about it. The score, composed by Irène Drésel, is relentless — a wall of pounding electronic noise that sits over almost every scene, insisting on an intensity that Nicloux’s quieter cinematographic instincts are actually achieving more effectively on their own. So when the film is allowed to breathe, it’s genuinely unsettling. The camera stays close to Romy, and the accumulation of strange encounters, ambiguous locals and wilfully unhelpful authorities creates a real sense of paranoid disorientation. The score undercuts all of this by telling you exactly how to feel, loudly, when uncertainty would have been far more disturbing.
A mystery that derives its power from the refusal of easy answers should probably resist providing them, and Mi Amor doesn’t quite manage that. The resolution is tidier than the film deserves, and lands with less impact than the slow-burning strangeness of what precedes it might have promised.
And yet there’s something here worth watching for. Nicloux is a director who trusts his actors and handles the human moments with a lightness that the more mechanical thriller elements struggle to match. Mi Amor is at its best in the spaces between the plot — an awkward poolside conversation, a shared cigarette between people trying to figure each other out, the particular silence of a hotel room in the early morning. Those moments suggest a better film hovering just behind this one, and they linger after the louder stuff has faded.
Catch Mi Amor at the Edinburgh Film Festival. Screen times and tickets are available here.
