Close

Thirteen year old "Léo" (Eden Dambrine) and his schoolfriend "Rémi" (Gustav De Waele) are inseparable. The play together, eat together, sleep together - an ideal fraternal relationship. At school, though, their classmates start to make disparaging remarks about them, and the naturally more gregarious "Léo" begins to shun his friend a little, then a little more... Tragedy ensues after "Rémi" doesn't show up for a school trip and the repercussions hit the young "Léo" and "Sophie" (Émilie Dequenne) - the mother of his friend - especially hard. On one level this film is about cruelty. Not a…

I don't rate a film 10/10 unless it's wonderful and my reviews tend to be motivated by either abject disappointment or outright admiration. I think that's very much most people's experience of film, you either love it or you don't. With Close, there's everything to love and it is an exercise in pure love, not just in its storyline but also the art of film, acting and storytelling. Importantly. It is akin to a dissection, an expert analysis of youth told through the eyes of two boys in tremendous pain. It is nuanced and a near savant, perceptive commentary on the predjudices cultivated within…

Summary: 9/10: A tender, devastating examination of how homophobia and toxic masculinity destroy male intimacy, anchored by extraordinary performances from Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele that make the film's tragedy feel both intimate and unbearably universal. There's a moment early in Lukas Dhont's Close when thirteen-year-old Léo and Rémi race their bicycles through fields of flowers in the Belgian countryside, laughing, utterly unselfconscious, bound by the kind of friendship so total it doesn't require explanation. They share a bed during sleepovers, have private jokes only they…

While marketed towards a gay audience, is not really a gay story. Spoilers: it's about two young teens that were best friends their whole life, but when they got to middle school other kids thought they were a couple and started teasing them. The more sensitive boy ingored it, but the other boy was greatly bothered by it and dropped his friend to create a new image for himself. The more sensitive boy ended his life and the rest of the movie dealt with how others responded to that and the guilt carried by his former friend. Other than how being labeled as gay can affect someone's life, and…