The line that stuck with me was: “There's so much pressure to be a part of the world.” It's muttered by a character trying to make sense of life in lockdown, but it could just as easily be Olivier Assayas himself, peering through the lens and wondering why this film needed to exist at all.
Yes, we're still making pandemic films. And no, they still don't work.
Suspended Time, or Hors du temps in its native French, is Assayas' attempt to bottle 2020's anxiety, restlessness, and self-indulgent naval-gazing into one slow-burning domestic comedy. It premiered at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival, and not to put too fine a point on it—it landed like a wet sock. Reviews were unkind. Even longtime admirers of Assayas (myself included) were left squinting, wondering if maybe we'd all finally aged out of whatever language he was speaking.
Set during the first wave of Covid-19, the story corrals two couples into a rural house in the Chevreuse Valley. They bicker about hand sanitizer, argue about food deliveries, and fumble through existential dread, all while staring into screens and pontificating about life. You know, the usual.
Vincent Macaigne plays Paul Berger, a filmmaker returning to his childhood home with his girlfriend (Nora Hamzawi), brother (Micha Lescot), and said brother's new squeeze (Nine d'Urso). There's some fuss about lockdown ethics, some musings about art and mortality, and a good deal of stiff, cloistered dialogue that never really escapes the clatter of the screenplay's architecture.
It's not that Suspended Time is terrible. It's just… exhausted. The kind of film that feels like a personal diary nobody meant to publish, but did anyway—maybe out of habit, maybe out of guilt. There are glimmers of Assayas' usual elegance: the way he films interiors, the texture of interpersonal frictions, the subtle stabs at French intellectualism. But the rhythm is off. The soul's not in it.
Watching the trailer (released by Music Box Films ahead of the film's August 15, 2025, U.S. theatrical rollout), I was struck by how inert everything feels. Not just visually—though, yes, the palette is washed out in that “mid-tier prestige” teal—but emotionally, spiritually. It's a film of sighs, stares, and screen fatigue. A Zoom call disguised as cinema.
There's a line in the press material calling it a “fiercely neurotic ode to memory.” Which sounds about right. The problem is, memory alone isn't enough to carry a film—especially when it's the memory of sourdough starters and doomscrolling.
Now, to be fair: Assayas isn't new to cloistered spaces or neurotic intellectuals. Summer Hours did it better. Non-Fiction did it sharper. Personal Shopper—well, that was something else entirely. But Suspended Time lacks the urgency, the unpredictability, the cinematic pulse that made those previous works crackle. It's airless.
Maybe the real issue here is the timing. Pandemic cinema, if it must exist, needs to bring something fresh to the table—a perspective, a catharsis, a reason to revisit what most of us are still trying to forget. Instead, this feels like a time capsule we didn't ask to open.
Still, I wouldn't dismiss it outright. There are moments in the trailer—brief flashes—where you catch a whiff of something truer: a longing for quiet, a mourning for time lost, a strange affection for solitude. But those moments drown in the film's overall inertia. Like so many lockdown memories, they blur.
Would I recommend it? Only if you're an Assayas completist or the kind of viewer who finds comfort in cerebral ennui. Otherwise, you're better off watching Clouds of Sils Maria again. That one had ghosts too—but they moved.
Suspended Time premiered at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival and will be released by Music Box Films in select U.S. theaters on August 15, 2025.
