We open with a whisper, a hushed incantation: two boys crouched together in an underground recess, voices echoing through inky shadows.
"Don't make any noise," one of them quivers. In the distance, they can make out the thunder of footsteps, the silvery clink of armour – at least in their game of medieval make-believe. A shaft of sunlight illuminates their hide-out, revealing their wooden swords: homemade weapons against all the wicked woes of the world outside.
When we return to the game soon after, something has shifted; something barely perceptible – both boys slightly more sulky, slightly less invested, even as the same fictional army advances towards them.
Their swords remain undrawn, their wills a little weaker. There's a reticence to indulge the fantasy that had gripped them a moment earlier.
Close, the second feature by the brilliant, controversial Belgian director Lukas Dhont (Girl), lingers on these fantasies – childhood games, sure, but also the fantasies embedded in each human relationship. (The stories we tell ourselves in order to live, as Joan Didion famously put it.)
Friendship, Dhont suggests, is a series of tests of our faith in one another, which is tried and evaluated again and again until it either ossifies or snaps.
To trust another is a form of self-delusion.
That might seem an overly pessimistic worldview, but Close (which shared the Grand Prix at last year's Cannes, before taking the top gong at Sydney Film Festival) is anything but – at least during its first act.
The pair of 13-year-olds we meet at the beginning are the impossibly cherubic Léo (Eden Dambrine) – blond locks, starry-eyed, the son of commercial flower farmers – and his best friend Rémi (Gustav De Waele), a precocious oboe player with an overactive brain that keeps him astir, even if he masks it with a tight-lipped diffidence.
Léo and Rémi share the perfect upbringing somewhere in agrarian Europe – so bucolic, so achingly picturesque it looks like a desktop screensaver. Theirs is a boyhood of boundless space, surrounded by fields permanently ablaze in a golden-hour glow.
The boys, despite their burgeoning adolescence, seem uncorrupted by reality and its discontents, totally enmeshed in each other's universes.
It's summer – the kind that might stretch on forever, if only we hang on long enough – and they while away the hours frolicking through dahlias as tall as their chins and biking with nary a destination in mind.
There's more than a whiff of Call Me by Your Name here – right down to the decision to leave the location unspecified, lending a storybook bliss to the whole balmy affair.
Imagination propels their endless rapture: the illusion that things might always be like this, even if they're doomed to change.
You can almost picture their American equivalents, fists pumping in the air with a rallying cry: "Best! Summer! Ever!"
But summer, like all good things, must end.
Soon, Rémi and Léo are pitched into their first year of high school, their precious companionship tested against playground politics.
What was once an unsullied, inviolable union is pitted against their classmates' nosey stares and tossed off jeers: a constellation of pinpricks that could never amount to trauma, and yet weighs heavy on both boys' understandings of each other.
Suddenly, a gesture as innocuous as a head on a shoulder, or a lunchtime nap – bodies cocooned side by side – becomes a perilous act of rebellion in a schoolyard that, above all, demands conformity.
You get the sense that Léo is the more susceptible of the two, instinctively policing his own inexplicable feelings for Rémi – which contain just the faintest hint of blossoming queer attraction.
When other students ask if they're a couple, Léo issues a vehement denial. But he's betrayed by his body: As the camera cuts closer, there's a rosy flush rising to his cheeks.
None of this is foreign territory for Dhont, whose debut film Girl inspired both widespread acclaim and vigorous criticism for its portrayal of a young, transgender ballerina – either clear-eyed and sensitive or exploitative and miserable, depending on who you talked to.
Girl – which, amongst other awards, won best first feature at Cannes in 2018 – shares with Close an unequivocal us-versus-them mentality.
The teenage characters of both films lead hermetic home lives, surrounded by gushing outpourings of love and support from their nearest and dearest.
Any shame they might experience is the result of an unforgiving world, brimming with outsiders who – whether intentionally or otherwise – corrode the innocence of their self-expression.
And like Girl, which ends on a bitter note of – perhaps unearnt – savagery, Close, too, lurches towards an act of violence, though it crash-lands into the film halfway through its duration.
To explicitly describe the incident is to dim its emotional resonance – so overpowering it will certainly draw gasps (and, inevitably, tears) from the audience.
There is some ingenuity in the shock value: In one fell swoop, Dhont punctures any preconceptions we may have held about Close remaining a gentle study of male friendship, and instead dives headlong into a different film – detailing the gloomy aftermath of tragedy.
But that second film is the more prosaic one. Remove Dhont's artful composition, and we're left with a weepy melodrama about grieving families that Hollywood has already made many times over (see: Manchester by the Sea, Rabbit Hole, even My Girl).
We lose the first act's shimmering heartbreak – the gut-wrenching agony of everyday drift – to a drastic twist that cleaves the boys apart in graceless fashion.
We lose the beauty and betrayal of a friendship falling apart in real time; the longing gazes cast across the playground as Rémi and Léo try – and fail – to become one again, each time spiralling further away instead.
We lose the two performances driving the film – some of cinema's most lucid child acting in recent memory, extracted by a prodigious director second-guessing his own instincts at every turn – to a narrative that leaves little room for nuance.
What begins with a whisper grows awfully loud. It's a shame it might be confused for noise.
Close is in cinemas now.
