Close (2022)

The Belgian countryside, a flower farm, two thirteen-year-old boys who sleep in the same bed without a flicker of self-consciousness. Lukas Dhont's Close opens in something near paradise, then lets the schoolyard do what schoolyards do. A trio of girls asks the obvious question. Léo denies it with a force that surprises even him. From there the film tracks a slow, agonizing retreat: the separate mattress, the ice hockey, the bicycle rides with other boys, the silence that grows teeth. It is a study of how quickly a child learns to be ashamed of tenderness.

The film's central preoccupation is unmistakably queer. The homophobic slurs arrive early, the speculation arrives earlier, and Rémi's suicide lands like a verdict on a boy who refused to perform the correct version of himself. Dhont has said the story has a queer character at its center, and the intimacy on screen is not ambiguous. The film also has something to say about the narrow corridor boys are permitted to walk, which reads as an observation about masculinity without ever mounting a formal argument about it. The damage is shown, not named, and that restraint keeps the sermonizing to a minimum. No lectures. Just a long look at the wreckage.

What Close declines to do is equally instructive. There is no racial commentary, no economic grievance, no environmental alarm, no meditation on the body, no neurodivergent lens, no revision of the historical record. The cast is white, Belgian, largely non-professional, assembled through an open call. Its ambitions are emotional and specific, and it refuses to serve as a vehicle for anything else. A somber, beautifully acted piece of work, then, and it trusts its audience to draw its own conclusions, which in this climate is almost quaint.