“Could I ask you something? Are you together?” That seemingly innocuous question—asked with what seems to be genuine, non-judgmental curiosity—sets off a heartbreaking conflagration in Close, the second feature co-written (with Angelo Tijssens) and directed by Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont. The scene is a school cafeteria at lunchtime, and the question is posed by a teen girl to a couple of 13-year-old boys, Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémy (Gustav De Waele), who are sitting next to each other—who, indeed, seem to be joined at the hip, with Léo spending the night at Rémy’s house so frequently that his mother (Émilie Dequenne) thinks of him as an adopted son. They’re inseparable best friends, and at this point, some 12 minutes into the movie, any viewer might be wondering, like the girl across the cafeteria table, whether their relationship perhaps goes deeper than that. Among other things, Léo and Rémy are physically affectionate with each other in a way that’s utterly devoid of self-consciousness: Léo will rest his head on Rémy’s shoulder for a moment in class (where they of course have adjacent seats), and idle hours outdoors sometimes see the two boys lay on the grass perpendicularly, with one’s head on the other’s stomach.

The film is titled Close (in English; it’s not a translation) for a reason, however, and Dhont deliberately makes a point of providing no clear indication of either boy's sexual preference, assuming that they've even settled upon one. What’s certain is that, for Léo, the mere broaching of that subject has an effect akin to Adam and Eve chomping down on the Fruit of Knowledge and suddenly realizing that they’re butt naked. Though he answers without any sign of rancor or discomfort, explaining that they’re just friends but almost like brothers, we next see him working in the field with his family—a chore he’d previously avoided in favor of playing with Rémy. And when Rémy rests his head on Léo’s stomach during recess at school, Léo glances around to see who’s watching, then gently rolls out from under, claiming the day is too hot for that. To his credit, the kid’s not a complete asshole, and makes every effort not to hurt his buddy’s feelings even as he inserts some distance between them for appearance’s sake. To Rémy, though, it feels like the worst kind of betrayal, and an awkward period of trial separation eventually turns into something more like divorce, with each boy gravitating toward a new group of friends. Seems sad, but, hey, kids are resilient.

What happens next perhaps constitutes a spoiler, but there’s no good way to talk about Close while dancing around that plot point. (Save the rest of this review for later if you think you might see the film and would rather not know.) It’s also, at least in some corners, a controversial development, for reasons I’ll address below. Final warning, here goes: One day, Rémy doesn’t show up for a school field trip—there’s a “Bueller? Bueller?” moment—and the kids later wind up abruptly being hustled back to the bus and driven back to the school grounds, where they’re clearly surprised to see their parents already awaiting their return. Dhont directs this entire sequence masterfully, so that the sight of adults jogging alongside the bus, glimpsed out of focus through rain-spattered windows, ties your stomach into knots. We already know what must have happened…and so, on some level, does Léo, who remains on the bus after everyone else has left, forcing his mother to get on and break the terrible news. Rémy is dead. And while nobody ever explicitly says that he took his own life, which is entirely typical of this film’s oblique delicacy, that’s what’s unmistakably communicated via every devastated look and half-strangled utterance.

When it premiered in competition at Cannes last year, Close took home the Grand Prix (second prize, more or less), ex aequo with Claire Denis’ Stars at Noon, and reviews have generally been very positive. You’re reading one of those right now, in fact. There are two schools of negative thought about Rémy’s suicide, however (virtually everyone agrees that the film is superb prior to that), and I understand both of them, even as I ultimately concur with neither. Some people simply find the huge mid-film swerve unnecessary, arguing that Close would have been more interesting had it continued to explore the boys’ shattered relationship, rather than suddenly shift into a numbed portrait of grief and guilt. We’ll never know, of course. I can say, though, that while I’d happily have watched that hypothetical movie, I was also “happy,” in a gut-wrenching way, to watch the one that Dhont actually made. Dambrine (who looks angelic enough to make an ideal Tadzio, should anyone be pondering a new adaptation of Death in Venice) gives a gorgeously internalized performance, making Léo's emotions transparent without signaling them, and Dhont likewise chooses the indirect approach virtually every time, allowing weighty moments to slowly gather force via hesitation and deflection. Odd as the comparison may sound, much of Close's second half plays like a more conventional version of Kenneth Lonergan’s near-masterpiece Margaret, digging into Léo's overwhelming feeling of responsibility for Rémy’s fate while also acknowledging that misery and loss don't occupy his every waking moment. It’s gratifying complex stuff.

The other common complaint is significantly thornier. Dhont took some heat, especially from trans critics, for his debut feature, Girl (unseen by me), in which the role of a trans girl who wants to be a ballerina is played by a boy. (The film also received plenty of glowing notices, for the record, and won the Caméra d’Or—best first feature—at Cannes 2018.) And while Dhont is openly gay, that hasn’t stopped some viewers from accusing him of reinforcing, via Rémy’s suicide, the tiresome, damaging trope in which gay characters who aren’t the straight protagonist’s sassy, wisecracking best friend are inevitably doomed. As a straight dude myself, I’m in no position to confidently assert that this criticism is misplaced. It does assume, though, that Rémy is at least potentially gay, and Dhont, as I previously noted, goes well out of his way to neither confirm nor deny that particular assumption. Consequently, I took the film at face value, as a remarkably delicate tragedy in which schoolyard homophobia plays a pivotal role but is neither central nor defining. Maybe it’s just that, as someone who grew up in the ’70s, when the F word was an insult so commonplace as to seem inoffensive, I very much want there to be a film that’s properly horrified by Western civilization’s pervasive inability to regard emotional intimacy and physical affection between men (or boys) as perfectly normal.

In any case, Close got to me, first with its depiction of a tender bond that’s ruptured over something idiotic (if understandable) and then with its remarkably gentle, undemonstrative view of what it’s like to bear a burden too heavy to continually acknowledge. Dhont and his cinematographer, Frank van den Eeden, employ almost beatific lighting early on, before the Fall, then switch to a more naturalistic mode that still finds beauty in faces; editor Alain Dessauvage does a superb job of shifting among disparate tones, maintaining a continuity that’s at once jagged and smooth. (Smoothly jagged, if you will). For my money, the film goes seriously wrong only in the home stretch, when Léo’s ongoing anxious pas de deux with Rémy’s mother—who seems to be unaware of how decisively the boys had split prior to Rémy’s death—suddenly turns into a clumsily suspenseful rehash of Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardennes’ The Son, with its tension between inadvertent killer and bereaved parent. (Doesn’t help that Dequenne, more than 20 years later, remains best known for playing the title role in the Dardennes’ Rosetta.) Also, the symbolism of Rémy's mom working in a maternity ward is a bit much (much like The Son's carpentry). Overall, though, it’s hard not to be touched by this story of a boy who pays a dear price for succumbing to peer pressure, even in a modest way.