Too Close movie review & film summary (2021)

“Too Close” begins with a horrifying act, given appropriate tension and horror by Tully’s claustrophobic direction: On a rainy night, a clearly frantic Connie drives her SUV, with her daughter Annie (Isabelle Mullally) and her neighbor’s daughter Polly (Thea Barrett) in the backseat, onto a bascule bridge. As the flashing red light indicates that the bridge is separating in the middle, Connie punches it—ramming through a dividing barrier and sending the car into the river below. After she is pulled out (horrendously bruised, but not devastatingly injured) and both children are rushed to the hospital (where they’re placed in comas, their health precarious), Connie becomes known as the “yummy mummy monster,” and her case receives national attention. Emma, a forensic psychologist, takes the case after she ignores her husband Si’s (Risteard Cooper) reservations. Her task is to determine whether Connie’s amnesia is genuine, and so she records their meetings to revisit later. What was Connie’s relationship with Ness (Thalissa Teixeira), the beautiful new neighbor who becomes Connie’s best friend, who mimics her tattoos and her perfume, and who ingratiates herself into the lives of Connie and her husband Karl (Jamie Sives)? What about when Ness’ wife left her and their daughter Polly, and Connie realized that maybe she didn’t just care deeply about Ness—maybe she was actually falling in love with her? How did that make Connie feel?

Connie, meanwhile, doesn’t take Emma’s questions lying down; instead, she instigates a battle for dominance with lengthy monologues about the unhappiness she senses in Emma as well. Gough, who elevates the material given to her by markedly differentiating between the Connie of before with the Connie of now, spits out barb after barb with measured relish. Do Emma and Si still have sex? Is Emma happy in her job? Does Emma have children? Does she love them? “You can be very tedious, Connie,” Emma says, but aren’t the questions Connie is asking her really clues about Connie herself?

The problem with this tête-à-tête dynamic between Emma and Connie, though, is that when “Too Close” incorporates flashbacks for Connie or present-day scenes for Emma, the narrative often relies on its characters acting, frankly, absurd. The instigating events to which Connie reacts are so illogical and so lacking in realism that watching certain scenes becomes irritating rather than illuminating. (Other issues: that the series’ only Black or women of color characters are uniformly portrayed as duplicitous, cruel, or negligent, and that characters’ sexual preferences and potential queerness feel primarily like “gotcha!” moments.) Emma’s character, and the subplots that drive her, fare better, and Watson impressively wields a number of unimpressed, numb, and aghast expressions: after her friends’ gossipy reaction to Connie’s case, after a dutiful and unsatisfying sex scene with her husband, and after a harrowing conversation with Connie’s confounded father.