On his way back home after five years absence, Sam (Elliot Page) is reunited with Katherine (Hillary Baack), an old flame, on the train.  Neither party is who they were back in high school; Katherine now married with two children and Sam has fully transitioned from female to male.  Already in an emotionally charged state, Sam makes his way to his childhood home to celebrate his father’s (Peter Outerbridge) birthday.  As siblings, parents, and in-laws are confronted with a full house for the first time in years, tensions begin to rise as Sam strives to be true to himself and his family struggles, to various degrees, to accept him for who he is. 

Dominic Savage writes and directs Close to You, a hyperreal homecoming which Page assisted in breaking the story.  It debuted at the 2023 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, but stateside distribution evaded the Canadian production until early 2024 when it was picked up by Greenwich Entertainment who gave the title a short, late summer release ahead of its streaming bow on Netflix late it the fall.  At only 99 minutes, the film packs a punch, opting for more of an active analysis approach instead of a more traditional screenplay which allows the actors the freedom to improvise and react as their characters while the security of knowing certain plot points to hit helps to give shape to and move the story along. 

Page leads the film with such a stern hand on the wheel that it is surprising he is only credited with “story by.”  The performance is fueled by an equal ferocity evident from the first act when he is reunited with Katherine and later follows her off the train even though it is well before his own stop.  Baack presents some timidness to the performance, understandable given the history between the two characters, but we quickly align ourselves to her in our own reception of Sam; accepting, but wary.  He is an almost oppressive figure as he softly interrogates his ex-girlfriend about her life, and through the events of the third act, it really paints Sam in an unsavory light.  While it is nice to see queer characters no longer having to be bastions of morality to be “allowed” to grace the screen, it is always a bold swing to craft a narrative – especially a through and through drama such as this – where the protagonist is not a pleasant person. 

Before all of that, though, Sam is met with rejection by Katherine as her husband pulls up to the train station to take her home, leaving the dejected Sam to walk back to his family home.  Once there, we are thrown headfirst into a convoluted dynamic that the film is not particularly interested in exploring more than the broad strokes safe for a few moments of welcomed nuance, even if the dialogue is rather clunky and contrived given the experimental nature of the performances.  Since this is not a typical chamber piece despite its theatrical setup where the unhappy ensemble spends the runtime picking at each other, we do not necessarily need to get into all of the backstory of these characters back together under one roof, but the absence of that fabric which unites them is certainly evident.  Even still, the script never quite develops them in the moment as more than starting points for an argument, more particularly, launching pads for Sam’s diatribes; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) this is not, even with the latter having to sidestep its queer undertones. 

There is no bigger blowout than the one just past the center mark of the film as the family gathers around the dinner table.  Sam and Paul (David Reale) had already gotten off on the wrong foot when the latter overspent on his birthday gift to the patriarch with a designer watch and upstaged Sam’s rather heartfelt and genuinely appreciated necktie.  Paul is so obtusely written to allow for Sam to proselytize, and while that can be a rather ungenerous read, the film invites it because it feels very surface level in its handling of themes of gender, identity, and acceptance. It is not looking to further someone’s understanding of the trans experience, but rather to go on the offensive and berate any discussion whatsoever since they pained Paul with such a bad faith line of questioning.

Close to You, in its quieter moments, is still a quite powerful story about family and love – a delicately handled slip up by Sam’s mom (Wendy Crewson) and a heartfelt conversation later between father and son – but its louder moments where it is trying to make a point is its own undoing.  It is hard to discredit the film and its message because it comes from a genuine place, but the clearly telegraphed traps and pitfalls which only Sam can manage to avoid give the film a blunt, preachy quality without really telling audiences anything new or offering any new understanding.  Further, Page, while passionate, is not strong enough of an orator to deliver these big emotion speeches in a way that does not sound like they are just reading off of a reddit board.  It is a case of trying to find that raw and true performance getting in the way because by not committing the film to the page, Savage has given away his chance at realizing that these arguments are clunky and consequently denied himself of various rounds of edits that could have been used to finetune the message and delivered a much more powerful film. 

From there, the film takes a vary strange turn, reuniting Sam with Katherine.  Again, it is nice to see that queer narratives have evolved so that their characters do not need to be morally faultless so as not to further upset the general audience, but to hammer through such a blunt infidelity arc really derails the whole film.  Not that the middle act was offering all that much to audiences, it at least was putting on the airs of leading towards some kind of revelation, but this third act is beyond stagnant.  While Baack does feel more comfortable in the role which helps us fall a little closer in line with the film’s new rhythm, Savage and Page are either at odds with each other here on what kind of story they are looking to tell, or they have simply taken the experiment too far too turn it around.