Israeli film “Come Closer” is about the serious emotional confusion of one deeply troubled young woman who is also often quite unpleasant for her toxic self-absorbed behaviors. Although the movie is rather dissatisfying as stumbling more than once during its last act, you may not easily forget many human flaws of this disagreeable but fascinating character mainly thanks to the strong performance of its lead actress.

At first, the movie, which is mainly set in Tel Aviv, Israel, follows a lad named Nati (Ida Tako), who is going to have a private time with somebody on his 17th birthday but then is taken to somewhere else by his friends and his older sister Eden (Lia Elalouf) instead. After having a wild evening along with them, he eventually sneaks out from the spot for meeting that figure in question, but, alas, he subsequently gets himself hit by a car, and then he eventually dies to the devastation of Eden and his parents.

While Eden struggles to process her immense grief, her parents try to console her as much as possible, but they have some other issue to handle. When Eden and Nati were very young, their parents had a bitter divorce, but they agreed to sell their family house once both Nati and Eden become independent adults. While the father is already willing to sell the house right now, the mother is adamantly against it, and Eden does not give much damn about their conflict over the house.

And then she comes to learn about something hidden from her for a while. It turns out that Nati had been in a romantic relationship with a girl named Maya (Darya Rosenn), and Eden becomes quite interested in getting to know this girl in question. Although their first encounter is not that pleasant to say the least, Eden and Maya gradually befriend each other as sharing the memories of Nati between them, and then there comes a point when they begin to sense something else being developed between them.

As Eden struggles to deal with her increasingly confused emotional status along the story, the movie gives us a vivid and realistic slice of youthful night life enjoyed by her and many other young people in the city. As spending more time with Eden, Maya naturally becomes more attracted to Eden’s carefree lifestyle, and we later get a rather awkward moment when Eden and Maya happen to come across a certain man who has been Eden’s occasional sex partner despite being currently married.

Meanwhile, we also come to notice more of the toxic behaviors shown by Eden as she becomes more self-absorbed in her grief on Nati’s death. She and Maya eventually decide to go along with their mutual feeling later in the story, but Nati’s death remains as an inconvenient fact between them, and Eden often seems to care more about him instead of paying more attention to Maya. As a result, Maya becomes all the more frustrated with Eden’s frequently inconsiderate behaviors, and we are not so surprised when she finally lets out all the frustration and confusion of hers to Eden in the middle of their little private time outside the city.

Around that point, the screenplay by director/writer Tom Nesher, which is inspired to some degree by her and her family’s real-life experience as reflected by what is shown during the end credits, enters a very disturbing area of grief and attachment. However, the movie unfortunately does not handle well the consequence, and the following ending is quite contrived as resolving the conflict between its two main characters too easily. 

Most of all, we remain distant to its very problematic heroine as before. While we understand her grieving status to some degree, Eden looks so disturbed at times that you may often want to send her to any good therapist as soon as possible instead of getting to know her more. At one point early in the story, she wears not only Nati’s clothes but also his underwear, and that is certainly a serious sign of mental disturbance in my humble opinion. 

Nevertheless, the movie is fairly watchable because of the raw emotional intensity observed from Lia Elalouf’s uncompromising performance. Never making any excuse on her character’s unwise and frequently toxic behaviors at all, Elalouf did a commendable job of conveying to us the emotional turmoil behind her character’s brash attitude, and her performance is effective as a sort of morbid case study for us to observe.

In contrast, several main cast members in the film function as mere counterpoints for Elalouf’s strong acting, and that is another weak aspect of the movie. While Ido Tako leaves some impression early in the story, Darya Rosenn holds her own place well during her several key scenes with Elalouf, and Netta Garti and Yaakov Zada-Daniel fill their rather under-developed roles as much as possible.

Overall, “Come Closer”, which was incidentally selected as the Israeli submission to Best International Film Oscar in 2024. is a bit too flawed for recommendation, but it is not wholly without interesting things to be appreciated. Nesher, who is the daughter of prominent Israeli filmmaker Avi Nesher, did a fairly competent feature film debut here after making several short films, and I can only hope that I will be more impressed by whatever may come next from her.