Close review – adolescent drama feels like a calculated exercise in misery porn

There are twenty-ish minutes in Close, the new film from Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont, in which the writer-director suggests an intimate, nuanced drama about the friendship between two adolescent boys, whose particular brand of closeness is enviable, remarkable, perhaps representative of something more. But that film is not meant to be.

Dhont's 2018 debut, Girl, was met with equal parts praise and controversy over its story of a transgender girl's attempts to become a ballerina. But his new movie is manipulative and deeply, aggressively sentimental  – as close to misery porn as is possible to find in a film not based around a historical atrocity. All cinema is manipulation, we understand, but if the power of great cinema is that you don't feel it, here you can practically see the strings working in every frame, calculated to generate the maximum amount of tears.

This is not to play down the admittedly excellent performances from lead actors Gustav De Waele and Eden Dambrine, who play Rémi and Léo, thirteen-year-old friends living an idyllic life in the Belgian countryside and sharing a bond, both emotional and physical, that feels authentic to the point of non-performance. For a while the movie – handsomely shot in sun-kissed style by Frank van den Eeden – plays in the key of adolescent almost-romance, suggesting a potential queer attraction between the two, before a few ridiculing comments from schoolmates push Léo into a gay panic that causes him to cut himself off from Rémi.

This, in itself, seems like fertile ground for exploration. But is it not an area that Dhont seems interested in. Instead we get an abrupt tragedy – and along with it, a thudding sense that the film hasn't put in anywhere near enough groundwork to earn this morbid angle whatsoever. In the shallow exploration of guilt that follows, Close's second half becomes increasingly more conventional, pushing on the fallout of an unconvincing tragedy with a hackneyed, single-minded excess. The pile-on of devastating filmmaking choices soon become as relentless as the pained score by Valentin Hadjadj: easy visual metaphors, extreme close-ups of Léo's tears running down his cheeks, symbolism hitting you over the head until you want to scream.

It all feels particularly egregious because we glimpsed such potential in the opening section. Even in giving Dhont's narrative direction the benefit of the doubt, Close feels like a dramatic dead end, its characters mere vessels for suffering but with almost no interiority of their own. More frustratingly, the film also seems unsure about the only fascinating idea it has left: the complex relationship between Léo and Remi's mother, Sophie (played in an affecting performance by Émilie Dequenne), comes to feel like a missed opportunity. All that seems important to Dhont is that something very terrible happened and that we as viewers should feel very sad – nay, guilty – about it.

It's true that Close has been met with mostly warm to positive reception elsewhere. The screening I saw, in Cannes, had the effect of reducing many a critic to floods of tears. But I can't help but feel like the execution of this story is hinged on the wrong aspects, with an intent so precisely programmed towards generating anguish that it left me feeling angry rather than moved.

Close is released in UK cinemas on 3 March.