Lukas Dhont’s Close begins with the unspoken joy of childhood — two boys running through fields of flowers, laughter echoing under the summer light. It feels weightless, pure. But underneath that serenity lies the seed of what will become one of the most quietly devastating films about friendship, masculinity, and loss in recent European cinema.

Movie Details	Close
Country	Belgium
Year	2022
Genre	Drama, Coming-of-age
Runtime	105 min
Director	Lukas Dhont
Main Actors	Eden Dambrine, Gustav De Waele, Émilie Dequenne, Léa Drucker

Dhont captures an age when affection is still innocent, before society begins to name, define, and police emotions. Léo and Rémi share a bond so natural that it seems outside of language. Yet when they start secondary school, the world intrudes: whispers, glances, and the cruel simplicity of peer pressure. What follows is not a melodrama, but a slow, painful unraveling — the invisible fracture of a friendship under the weight of judgment.

The director works with an extraordinary sense of restraint. His camera stays close, often at the height of his young protagonists, observing rather than intruding. There’s no need for dialogue to tell us what’s being lost; the silence between them becomes the film’s true language. Dhont’s visual grammar — luminous fields, tight interiors, soft natural light — mirrors the transition from openness to confinement, from childhood’s boundless space to the narrow corridors of social expectation.

Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele deliver astonishing performances. Their vulnerability feels untouched by artifice — as if Dhont had simply captured two real lives in motion. Dambrine, especially, carries the film’s emotional arc with a heartbreaking combination of confusion and guilt, his gestures trembling between denial and longing.

The second half of Close transforms the innocence of the opening into a meditation on grief and responsibility. It’s not just about loss, but about the silence that follows it — the way children are left to process pain that adults cannot help them name. Dhont doesn’t point fingers; he portrays the world as a web of misunderstandings where empathy arrives too late.

Emotionally, Close is almost unbearable in its tenderness. It refuses cynicism or sensationalism, choosing instead to dwell on what remains unsaid: a hand not held, a door left open, a question never asked. The film’s rhythm — slow, deliberate, intimate — allows the smallest details to acquire immense weight: the sound of breathing, the rustle of leaves, the space between two faces that were once inseparable.

Visually, the film evokes both beauty and fragility. Frank van den Eeden’s cinematography paints the Belgian countryside as a fragile utopia, always on the verge of disappearing. The color palette shifts imperceptibly from the golden hues of childhood to the cold blues of solitude, mirroring Léo’s internal descent.

Close ultimately becomes a film about what is lost when we teach boys to be less open, less affectionate, less vulnerable. It’s a story of growing up, but also of shutting down — of the emotional amputations that often accompany masculinity.

Dhont’s film won the Grand Prix at Cannes for a reason: it speaks a universal truth with disarming simplicity. Close is not a tragedy about what happened, but about what could have been — a fragile, luminous elegy for the kind of closeness the world too often destroys.