Movie Review: Worlds of Possibility are 'A Few Feet Away'

Writer-director Tadeo Pestaña Caro makes modern hookup app dating feel purgatorial

(Max Suen in A Few Feet Away. Cinephobia Releasing)

Writer-director Tadeo Pestaña Caro brings a fresh and lively voice to queer cinema with his debut feature, A Few Feet Away (A metros de distancia). Twenty-year-old Santiago (Max Suen) finds himself obsessed when a Grindr user sends him an erotic image. Though his night started out as a date with one prospect, it spirals into a pilgrimage through clubs, house parties, and play spaces, as he follows Grindr’s breadcrumbs indicating where his quarry has gone, all while his angst and dissatisfaction grow.

The film also traverses disparate emotional terrain. Connecting on and off throughout the night with his work colleague Karen and her date — and some cute friends they’re hanging out with — Santiago spins different versions of his failed date, none of which remotely square with what we see on screen. But is he inventing his adventures, or predicting them? One version of his story involves an unexpected threesome… and it just so happens something along those lines is awaiting him.

(Cinephobia Releasing)

Or is it? We’re never entirely sure of what happens. Santiago is a classic unreliable narrator, and his night out takes on a dreamlike, hazy quality that’s atmospheric and tantalizing, but also vague. It’s ironically apt that the viewer may, to some degree, experience a version of what the frustrated Santiago suffers: This is a film that’s strangely, stubbornly hard to connect with emotionally.

As Santiago stumbles through a purgatorial milieu, rich promise of every sort seems within reach… and yet forever beyond his grasp. As a comment on modern dating culture — with its swipe-rights, dick pics, and online profiles — the film’s ramshackle, slightly nightmarish qualities are right on target.

A Few Feet Away is streaming now on VOD.