The film premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, and was released on August 16, 2024 in Canada. It was released in the United Kingdom on August 23, 2024.
Premise
Sam, a trans man, is heading back home for his father's birthday and bumps into an old friend, opening old wounds as he finds his family struggling to come to terms with his transition.[4]
Alongside Savage and Page, producers also include Krishnendu Majumdar and Richard Yee for their Me + You Productions banner and Daniel Bekerman and Chris Yurkovich, via Good Question Media. Financing comes from Kindred Spirit with Anita Gou and Sam Intili executive producing with Rolling Dice's Nia Vazirani, and Matt Jordan Smith of PageBoy Productions.[5][6] The project included high levels of improvisation and Page told The Guardian the experience was "a highlight of my life as an actor."[7]
It was released in the United States and Canada (Mongrel Media) on August 16, 2024,[12][13] and was released in the United Kingdom (Vertigo Releasing) two weeks later on August 30.[14][15] The movie will have its streaming debut on Netflix on November 15, 2024.[16]
Reception
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 66% of 58 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.1/10. The website's consensus reads: "A passion project for Elliot Page that benefits from his naturalism, Close to You's improvisational scripting yields dramatically uneven but ultimately moving results."[17]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 55 out of 100, based on 17 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.[18] Page's performance was widely praised, even by the film's detractors.[19]
Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, "It's raw and often powerful—less of a carefully shaped drama than the equivalent of a series of boxes filled with explosive material being slung about. It's less concerned with winning points for neatness than in letting scenes unfold in an unflinchingly immediate way."[20]
