Israel’s 2025 Oscar entry is a story of grief, sex and looming national tragedy
Tom Nesher’s ‘Come Closer’ is premiering in New York
Darya Rosenn and Lia Elalouf in Come Closer. Photo by Shai Peleg
By PJ Grisar December 2, 2025
Tom Nesher doesn’t like heavy dramas about grieving families. She wanted her first feature to be a coming-of-age film made while she came of age herself. But when her brother, Ari, was killed in a hit and run accident in 2018, just after his 17th birthday, tragedy kept working its way into her writing.
Rather than avoid the subject — covered extensively in the Israeli press — she resolved to make the movie she and her brother would love.
“A film that is full of life and sexy and funny,” Nesher, 28, said from her home in Tel Aviv, “but also the film that I would want to see as a grieving young person, and a film that I felt like was missing, a film that I was searching for at the time.”
Come Closer, which collected four Ophir Awards, including best picture and best director for Nesher, was the Israeli entry for the 2025 Academy Awards and makes its theatrical debut in New York Dec. 5. Filmed well before Oct. 7, and shaped by her own loss, the film has an eerie prescience.
The story begins when Nati (Ido Tako) is kidnapped, a bag placed over his head and his wrists zip-tied together. We later learn he’s being taken to a surprise birthday party at the beach. On his way home, he’s struck by a car, sending the life of his 20-something club kid older sister, Eden (newcomer and Ophir winner Lia Elalouf), into freefall.
Coping with the loss — which at one point, during the shiva, drives her to try on her brother’s underwear — Eden learns that Nati had a secret girlfriend, the sheepish, high school-aged Maya (Darya Rosenn). The two develop a bond that becomes almost levirate as they grow into something more than friends. Both emerge more bruised and battered than before.
“It was very much of the DNA of the movie, having this feeling of Eros and Thanatos, this falling in love that happens with the backdrop of death,” said Nesher.
One sequence that scandalized European audiences drives the theme home.
We see Maya send texts to Eden from her school trip to Auschwitz (responding to an image of a mountain of shoes, Eden asks her for “a pair in my size”). Eden later twerks to a club remix of the Hannah Szenes poem Eli, Eli — a DJ’s interpretation of her “Holocaust song” request. At the same time Maya is bored touring concentration camps, we see Eden marching in the judicial reform protests, bearing witness to the collapse of democracy.
“The most huge, historical, tragic events can happen, but they are just people falling in love or people having their small, intimate moments,” Nesher, whose grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, said. “Those things coexist.”
Watching the film today, Nesher is reminded of how every life lost is a tragedy leaving behind a mourning loved one. Come Closer knows something else about grief, true, Nesher believes, both to the war in Gaza, and human nature in general.
“When you are in great pain, you are, sadly, also in a place where you can create great pain for others,” Nesher said.
