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The sophomore effort of Belgian film writer/director Lukas Dhont tells the story of two 13-year-old boys, Léo and Rémi, and how their intimate friendship is disrupted when they start high school and many kids tease them questioning if they are a couple. After a few days at school, Léo puts some distance between himself and Rémi. He's not quite as overt about it as Brendan Gleeson is with Colin Farrell in this same year’s The Banshees of Inisherin, but he's just a kid and doesn't have the same command of language as Gleeson. No matter, Rémi takes the hint. After a dramatic turn, Léo is left alone and must deal with losing his closest friend and his feelings of responsibility for pushing that friend away for reasons he can't fully understand.

Nearly everything about the movie feels contrived to create something idealized and then puncture it via means that don't feel authentically motivated. In that way, Close plays like the inverse of Dhont's fellow countrymen the Dardenne Brothers' hyper-verisimilitude. But the film manages to draw you in from the early sunkissed scenes of summer in the rural Flemish countryside where the boys spend carefree days running around Léo's family's farm, spending evenings with Rémi's warm and caring parents, and enjoying platonic but charged sleepovers. And the mystery of what might be developing between these two boys keeps you compelled through the film's more grief-stricken second half, even if the events depicted seem manufactured.

Yet the film works because of the lead performance from first-time actor Eden Dambrine as Léo, whom Dhont apparently discovered riding a train. A great majority of the picture plays out in close-ups of Dambrine's mesmerizing face. I can't tell if this kid is an astonishingly good actor or if this is a case of the Kuleshov effect—in which the viewer derives internal meaning from the intercutting of an actor's unchanging face with different shots that evoke a reading of different emotions—but I expect it's the former. Doesn't really matter, Dambrine holds the film together with a largely silent stillness that contains a myriad of complex feelings he doesn't know how to process.

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