‘A Few Feet Away’ Review: A Night of Desire, Anxiety and Missed Connections

A Few Feet Away begins with Santiago (Max Suen) already well into a long night of dates and encounters. “The night is young,” his best friend tells him at one point, and there is still plenty more to come: the story may have a clear starting point, but there is no telling when—or how—it will end.

It had actually begun much earlier, in broad daylight, with an encounter disguised as a visit to an apartment for rent. The young man showing Santiago around (Martín Shanly) clearly has other plans, and the apartment viewing is little more than a pretext. But Santiago is reluctant and, with his characteristically terse, slightly cold gaze, chooses to walk away.

The night is still young in Buenos Aires. After putting in a few hours at the call center where he works, Santiago turns his attention to the gay dating app on his phone (Grindr), rapidly scrolling through bodies, invitations, nudes and the other variations of the virtual sexual-dating landscape. An encounter takes him to the Palermo neighborhood, where he meets another guy at a brewery. The conversation is pleasant, everything seems to be going well, but once again Santi leaves. Is it really, as he claims, that he simply wasn’t feeling the guy’s vibe—or is that just an excuse?

From there, he enters a state of nocturnal disorientation, first trying to arrange another encounter, then following a few guys down the street, crashing a party despite not having the right outfit, and eventually ending up with coworkers and friends at someone’s house. It is there that his best friend and colleague (Jazmín Carballo) tells him that the night is young. And she’s right: once the early hours arrive and nothing is happening, he’ll have to find something somehow. It might come through the app, which offers up confusing geographical information about a potential match, or from the most unexpected place.

Over the course of a night that shares some affinities with Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, Pestaña Caro’s feature debut explores a subterranean world of encounters and missed connections, circulating desire, misunderstandings and confusion, all unfolding under an atmosphere that feels more tense than it needs to be. Santiago rarely seems able to relax or enjoy himself. As a character, he is somewhat enigmatic: half shy, slightly arrogant, deeply anxious, occasionally aloof and somewhat prone to lying. He doesn’t know what he wants, but at the same time he seems to know—or at least suspect—that he doesn’t want to go home alone.

Moving through recognizable Buenos Aires neighborhoods defined less by their specific details than by their signs, storefronts and brands—the streets of Palermo and its surroundings become a blur of shops, cars and passing bodies—Santiago enters the secret and not-so-secret spaces of a city operating on several parallel levels at any given moment. He becomes something like the embodiment of the search itself: a walking, contradictory version of “I don’t know what I want, but I want it now.”

Perhaps he doesn’t really know what he wants. Adventure and risk attract him, yet he shies away from them. Human connection seems to interest him, but the moment he receives any real attention, he runs for the hills. To fill in the gaps, he lies or imagines endings to his stories that never actually happened.

After playing at several international and local festivals, A Few Feet Away arrives with a central idea: to incorporate apps and digital devices without judging them, treating them instead as essential components of contemporary nightlife. The film’s title itself plays on the way dating apps locate people who are physically close by, potentially turning proximity into an immediate encounter. The most direct reference comes when an app tells Santiago that someone is just five meters away from him at a party—yet he can’t find him.

That metaphor of missed connection could serve as the film’s central axis: a portrait of a generation caught between desire and fear, action and inaction, anticipation and terror. As night gradually turns into day, things become increasingly intense on the sexual front. For Santiago, the question is whether he wants to become part of that—or any other—party, or whether he would rather keep trying to figure out who he is and what he likes. Perhaps what he desires is always just a few feet away, constantly receding no matter how close he gets.