‘Close To You’: Toronto Review

Dir. Dominic Savage. Canada/UK. 2023. 98 mins

Already garlanded with accolades over some 25 years in front of the camera – notably for Inception and 2007’s award-laden Juno – actor Elliot Page launches a new phase of his big-screen career with Close To You, a highly personal project that emerges from his own experience coming out as a trans man. A close collaboration with UK writer-director Dominic Savage (Page has co-writing and production credits), the film comes soon after the publication of the actor’s memoir Page Boy, expanding fictionally on some of its themes.

Has the mark of undeniable integrity

Premiering in TIFF, Close To You boasts a soul-baring performance from Page in a drama that is sometimes emotionally testing, but that has the mark of undeniable integrity. Its sombre intensity may not easily appeal commercially outside a hardcore art cinema sector, but LGBT+ festivals and outlets especially will latch onto it as a key statement very much of this cultural moment.

Savage – whose films for TV and cinema include 2005’s Love + Hate and 2017 Gemma Arterton starrer The Escape – has a history of close collaboration with actors, notably on 2019-22 anthology series I Am, in which narratives emerged from his work with names including Vicky McClure, Letitia Wright and Kate Winslet. That appears to have been the process here too, with Close To You drawing on Page’s experience to develop this story of a young trans man getting back in contact with his estranged family and his unresolved past.

Page plays Sam, living at a friend’s house in Toronto. He is due for his first visit in four years to his family in the provinces, to celebrate his father’s birthday, but he dreads the reunion, feeling that they failed to support him in his transitioning. On the train there, Sam exchanges glances with a young woman, Katherine (Hillary Baack), who turns out to be an old close friend from high school. She recognises Sam from their now distant-seeming shared past and, while Katherine is now married with children, it is apparent that their former closeness had a romantic element, and that old feelings are being stirred up.

Arriving at his old house, Sam finds himself engulfed by the noise of his family who are very performatively acting as if he had never been away. Gradually, Sam gets to interact more quietly with various family members. His father Jim (Peter Outerbridge) admits to feeling scared at the changes in Sam’s life, but seems able to get close to him, while his mother Miriam (Wendy Crewson) admits to confusion, awkwardly trips over pronouns, then blurts out, “I still think of you as my little girl.” While showing Sam’s parents as blocked in their ability to understand him, the film presents them sympathetically; but things hit a harsher note in the confrontational position of prospective brother-in-law Paul (David Reale, giving some abrasive solidity to a character who might otherwise come across as a stereotypical alpha bro).

Whatever reconciliations seem imminent, they hit an impasse at the dinner table, where Sam dares contest the mantra that “family is the most important thing.” He heads back to Toronto, but there are still threads to tie up with Katherine – which is where this otherwise bleak-toned film gets an upbeat burst of intimacy and hope.

With much of it shot in wintry landscapes and the overcast, claustrophobic environs of small-town Canada (Page himself is from Halifax, Nova Scotia), this is a very desolate film in mood, its emotional signature set by Catherine Lutes’ photography which emphasises dark tones and looming enclosure. Page’s performance, tautly evoking Sam’s anger at long-term rejection, is always at the centre, but merges very organically with an ensemble cast from which individual characters only reveal themselves little by little. The family is presented at first as an overpowering, over-demonstrative collectivity, with sombre lighting and restless camera initially preventing us from discerning exactly who everyone is – a vivid reflection of Sam’s state of mind on first contact.

While films about nightmare homecomings are a staple of North American cinema, Close To You stands out in representing the family, however well-meaning, as a suffocating force that demands conformity – if only to an ideal of togetherness. It ia significant that the people Sam is closest to are also outsiders; his Toronto housemate, who is disabled, and Katherine, who is deaf, as is Baack who plays her.

Page’s close involvement in devising the project gives Close To You its ring of lived authenticity – but, while it avoids stereotype, the film does come across as somewhat broad-brush illustrative of the kind of family issues that a trans person like Sam, or indeed Page, might routinely contend with. Individual scenes have their own intensity and energy, with Outerbridge and Crewson especially compelling in their scenes with Page. Nevertheless, while this is not obviously a narrative-centred film, it does not come across as having the organic shape of a fully-formed drama, the late reunion with Katherine feeling a little awkwardly contrived. Similarly, while we understand Sam’s back story and present situation, we too rarely get a sense of who he is when not struggling against misunderstanding and harsh weather. The score, by Savage and Oliver Coates, highlighting piano and tremulous strings, contributes to making the overall tone of melancholy realism that can be touch too oppressive.