Parents' Guide to Drawing Closer

Drawing Closer is an inoffensive addition to the canon of movies about dying teens and how they and family and friends cope with their imminent tragic ends. But this feels especially trite, mild, and uninvolving. We are introduced to a series of inevitable outcomes and nothing in the film surprises us or changes that predetermined, gloomy, and rather uninteresting path. Beyond that, so many of the filmmakers' choices work against the presumed goal—a story that will involve us.

First, the washed-out visuals look like they've been shot through gauze on overexposed film. The over-reliance on fuzzy closeups makes for a vague visual package, too blurry to offer the kind of detail that translates into an audience's empathy. The doomed pair look like softly pasteled cartoons of beautiful teenagers rather than living beings savoring their last breaths. Further distancing the audience from the emotion is the tendency of the closeups to be accompanied by long, wordy, explanatory voiceovers. Tears flow while a voice explains what is making someone sad. This is a bad way to tell a story and guaranteed to leave the audience unmoved. In one voiceover, Akito explains himself: "So the boy who was afraid to die met the girl who was looking forward to it." By the end of the movie, unfortunately, we shrug and think, "So what?"