This Closeness
Written and Directed by Kit Zauhar
Starring Kit Zauhar, Zane Pias, Ian Edlund
Running time 88 minutes
Unrated
In New York theaters June 7, streaming on MUBI July 3

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

It's an interesting move, opening a movie with an ASMR display. When writer/director/star Kit Zauhar started her new film, This Closeness, with one of her character Tessa's ASMR videos, full of closely-mic'd rustling sheets and whispered lines like "Are you feeling comfortable in your bed? Here, why don't we fluff a pillow for you," it was a more direct address than I was used to getting from a narrative film. After that, the movie's regular conversations, the ones that didn't sound like they were recorded inside the characters' brains, felt heightened, in the same way you might pay more attention to a film's picture quality if you're the one maniac who tunes their TV's settings to the colored bars on a Criterion DVD before hitting 'play.' Once every little detail of every little sound has been pointed out, you're primed to be aware.

In This Closeness' next scene, the camera focuses on a piece of clothing sliding off a toilet as the sound mix is overwhelmed by a shower. Tessa and her boyfriend Ben (Zane Pais) are staying at an Airbnb with their temporary landlord's painfully awkward roommate, Adam (Ian Edlund). The couple is in Philly for Ben's high school reunion and things are off even without Adam potentially lurking around every corner. As uncomfortable as it is to bicker with your partner, it's that much worse when you're in a small space with a stranger and everybody can hear everybody else through the walls.

Given the film takes place almost entirely in this apartment, you're always conscious that there's another character listening to the conversation you're watching. Ben and his old high school friend Lizzy (Jessie Pinnick) will flirt and Tessa will be watching them uncomfortably, trying to insert herself further into their conversation, and then Adam will be in the next room, listening to all of them. Zauhar seems to have the most empathy for Tessa, but she physically aligns the audience with Adam, the weird dude who listens to other people's private moments and jerks off in the shower. As much as nobody would choose to be the Adam in any given situation, he is, like an audience, listening from the outside. It's a small relief when he slowly begins to assert himself more, establishing himself as something far away from the audience surrogate he initially appears to be.

Tessa and Adam mostly stay in the apartment, though they're usually separated by a wall or two. Ben catches up with classmates and gives Tessa the space to make her ASMR videos. Their relationship slides between being genuinely supportive and passive-aggressive, sometimes hitting both ends in the same moment, as when Tessa seems kind of embarrassed explaining ASMR to Adam and Ben interrupts with a backhanded "It sounds kind of weird, but..." These characters are smart, which means they know how to hurt each other, which means they hurt each other.

Mumblecore, the genre This Closeness most resembles, could feel tossed together, like the art department was just "whatever was in the room the director decided to film in." And that has a lot of appeal, but it's also refreshing to watch effort and intention. That world could sometimes starve you for people who gave a shit, and even beyond mumblecore, so many movies could be plays or books. This one, largely about communication hiccups, needed to be a film.

Word choices are analyzed, tone is read into, silences linger. "You sound like you're talking to a dog right now," Tessa says to Ben in the middle of an argument, turning his aggression back on himself by pointing out that he's being kind of a prick. And, again, even when the movie isn't affecting the feeling of an ASMR video, you notice the details. As subtle as the three main characters try to be throughout this story, you see through every veiled insult and the hesitations characters try to cover up when confronted with tough questions. That could be a sign of too-obvious writing, but the writing is, I think, very good. It's more a sign of strong acting.

Covertly listening to another person doing something, even if your ear isn't up against their wall, even if you don't mean to be listening, is a weird experience. People can describe overheard conversations as 'intimate,' but intimacy implies being let in. Overhearing conversations can feel more invasive than titillating. It's to the movie's credit that being trapped in a two-bedroom apartment with three people doing that to each other is intriguing, rather than suffocating. It helps that This Closeness is funny. Its best joke is about a person's butt hurting.

It also helps that these feel like real people, rather than "The Frustrated Young Woman" and "The Cocky Young Man" and "The Creepy Roommate." Tessa is unsentimental, happy to have moved on from wherever she grew up. There's a need in her that Ben either doesn't acknowledge or doesn't pick up on, for the world to be more centered on the present. It's not that she doesn't want to attend her own reunions, it's that she wants reunions to be abolished, or at least for people to feel shame for showing up at them. (I'm still untangling the idea that a director originally from Philly has her main character, who she plays, reject nostalgia and the need to return to your roots while setting her story in Philly, but only indoors, so that she didn't actually have to travel to Philly.)

I could see being frustrated with This Closeness if I thought I was supposed to relate to any of these people. I do relate to them, incidentally, but Zauhar's work never feels like there's some sweaty desperation pushing it toward accessibility. There are five characters with speaking roles here and four of them say things they'd probably feel sudden pangs of regret about years later. When characters have sex, it's more about control than about connection, though they all want very badly to connect. But I connected with them, and I did it while acutely aware of every sigh and mumbled insult and pregnant pause, zoomed in so far I had to respect their humanity.