Tensions rise when a couple stays at the home of a reclusive host, with the three entering an intimate battle to gain and regain territory.
REVIEW:
I was expecting This Closeness, a film about a couple who rent an Airbnb apartment they have to share with the current shy and nerdy tenant for the weekend, to become a horror film. Instead it turns into something much more interesting- a story about the way humans create and avoid closeness in their lives.
Tessa (the director Kit Zauhar) and Ben (Zane Pais) are New Yorkers who’ve rented a room in an Airbnb in Philadelphia so Ben can attend his five year high school reunion. They have a bedroom but share the rest of the apartment with the host, a reclusive nerdy loner, Adam (Ian Edlund). Adam claims his roommate Lance actually listed the place but is away visiting a sick relative.
This setup has horror written all over it. Initially, it just mimics life in a college dorm: fights, weirdness and awkwardness, tensions over how to split the refrigerator space and how long people can take In the bathroom, moderately cruel jokes heard through thin walls. These people are just a few years removed from college.
Soon the strategies to survive the close proximity evolve. Ben goes out to dinner and returns with a former high school crush, Lizzy (Jessie Pinnick) the reputed school tramp. Both of them are drunk and freely recalling their sexual hookups in front of an annoyed, embarrassed, threatened and jealous Tessa. Eventually it leads to a series of bedroom arguments between Tessa and Ben that are overheard by Adam.
The claustrophobic feeling of the one apartment set is very effective. The characters can and do leave and enter at will. Just the audience can’t. Zauhar is forcing us to watch human interactions in all their awkward variety. Ben and Adam spar in a polite but passive aggressive way over a malfunctioning air conditioner. It’s more of a territorial dispute, a struggle for authority than anything. Later, that escalates to gender warfare, first over Tessa’s video projects, her empathy and intentions over the reclusive Adam, ultimately to the inherent value of their relationship to each other.
The threat to their closeness is heightened by the need to connect to others and society through social media and phone calls. The cast delivers everything stripped down and straight. It’s all bare and unselfconscious, pure id colliding with ego for control of inner personal truth. Everything is projected through the scrim of life. When actual touch, and not just talk, occurs it’s bracing, surprising and shocking. It’s weird when we feel this closeness in distance from the touch of a stranger, even weirder when it happens with people we thought fully connected too.
Being near someone is no guarantee of real connection This Closeness seems to be saying. It gets a 3.5/5 or aB+. It’s streaming on Mubi.
CREDITS:
Directed by
Screenplay by
Kit Zauhar
Produced by
Ani Schroeter
Starring
- Zane Pais
- Kit Zauhar
- Jessie Pinnick
- Ian Edlund
Cinematography
Kayla Wolf
Edited by
Brian Kinnes
Production
companies
- Neon Heart Productions
- Modern Pleasures
- Discordia
- Nice Dissolve
Release dates
Running time
89 minutes
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