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When Lukas Dhont finished reading Deep Secrets, psychologist Niobe Way’s insightful book about the pressure young boys feel to harden themselves as they grow up, the Belgian director was moved.

“I didn’t really realize why I was so emotional,” he told me last December in a sun-drenched room at New York’s Ritz Nomad Hotel. “But then I realized that I was very much in resonance with these [American] boys that I had never met. I grew up on the Flemish countryside, but I also started to fear intimacy very early on and started to distance myself from people I really didn’t want to take distance from. That’s a wound I buried somewhere, but that book made me reconnect to that wound.”

His “reconnection” eventually inspired the creation of Close, Dhont’s sophomore film, which follows two young boys, Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele), as their lifelong friendship begins to fracture. Like the book — which interviews boys over the course of their adolescence, opening with a spotlight on the loving way young 13-year-old boys talk about their friendships — the film begins idyllically, with Léo and Rémi unabashedly enjoying their innocent, inseparable bond.

But just as Way’s interviewees changed as they got older, with their answers gradually morphing in tone from vulnerable to stoic, the connection between the two boys slowly shifts as they age. When the pair start high school, their peers begin to question the nature of their friendship, forcing both boys to develop a self-consciousness that didn’t exist before. And while Léo branches outward as a result, trying his best to fit in with the young men around him, a despondent Rémi turns inward, slowly pulling away from everything until, finally, tragedy strikes.

Read on… (major spoilers for Close)

Leo and Remi are two thirteen-year-old best friends, whose seemingly unbreakable bond is suddenly, tragically torn apart. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Lukas Dhont’s second film is an emotionally transformative and unforgettable portrait of the intersection of friendship and love, identity and independence, and heartbreak and healing.

Close, the new film by Lukas Dhont after his immensely promising but somewhat callow (and controversial) debut, Girl, sees the Belgian director reach another level in his filmmaking, showcasing his immaculate direction of actors, extraordinary ear for naturalistic dialogue that seems to be caught on the fly, and, especially, a deep emotional acuity. Readers are advised to bear in mind that this reviewer saw and heard the vast majority of this film through a fog of helpless tears and over the sound of his own racking sobs.

It has become fashionable to say that the particular makes stories universal; that anybody can relate to anything. This may be true to a certain degree, but Close will speak most effectively to anybody who has had to hold in a truth about themselves; the pain of what is unspoken, and seemingly cannot be said, by the two young schoolboys at the heart of this movie, is devastating to anyone with personal experience of that. In other words, while only barely alluding to it, Dhont has made a film that comes at queerness from a radically new angle, one which is wholly innocent and unsexualized.

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