Devastating: Close reviewed

The Belgian film Close, written and directed by Lukas Dhont, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes and is up for an Oscar, is a coming-of-age-story that’s exquisite and heart-breaking. Take tissues, and probably not just the one box.

Dhont’s starting point was psychologist Niobe Way’s book Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, which is based on hundreds of interviews and showed that boys have deeply intimate, confiding friendships until adolescence when they are socialised to withdraw from one another. (Just to be on the safe side I asked my adult son if this was his experience. ‘Yes’, he said.)

Here, our boys are Rémi (Gustav De Waele) and Léo (Eden Dambrine), who live in rural Belgium and are about to start secondary school but for now it’s the summer holidays. They run through fields of shoulder-height flowers (Léo’s family are flower farmers).