I’ve made up my mind about my favorite movies of 2022, but one of the most unique releases that I couldn’t let go of was Goran Stolevski’s You Won’t Be Alone. It’s a transformative — literally and figuratively — narrative that incorporates folklore, anthropology, and some gory scenes that feel more organic than shocking, like watching a fox dive into a rabbit carcass. I walked out of the theater feeling dazed, as if I knew the world less than I did before. A story about a shape-shifting witch in 19th century Macedonia (not exactly a commonplace cinematic location), You Won’t Be Alone is isolating and doesn’t ask for expectations or attachment. It lets us observe a culture that moves on its own accord without feeling the need to invite us in.

In Stolevski’s newest film, Of an Age, we are again submerged in a different culture: the kind of young romance that ignites at the turn of twilight (and of the millennium, as the story starts in 1999), certain of its meaning but uncertain of its future. It’s a period of open xenophobia and awkward puberty pains in an Australian suburb, similarly to Stolevski’s childhood following his emigration from Macedonia. Of an Age begins in a frenetic fit: on the morning of a dance competition, a prepared teenage Kol (Elias Anton) gets a call from his best friend and dance partner Ebony (Hattie Hook), who wakes up at an unknown beach. Their phone conversation is a disorienting match between Ebony’s high-pitched mumbling (a commendable feat of cry-talking with moderate enunciation) and Kol’s agitated nerves. In an Olympics-level game of dodging parental questioning, Kol manages to contact Ebony’s older brother Adam (Thom Green) to drive out to her location. Right when Kol enters the car, Adam informs that there’s no chance that the traffic will relent enough for them to make the competition in time. This is when the plot loosens from its Where’s Fluffy-esque mission and gently settles in a more tranquil, Before Sunrise situation.

Kol is gawky and Adam holds a bemused expression throughout their conversation in the car. Adam offhandedly reveals that he’s gay right when a tired Ebony enters and collapses in the backseat, which causes Kol to later stammer “You know, it’s okay to be gay” when they’re alone (a specific phrasing that reminds us what time period we’re at). While it seems like the urgency of one thing dissipates, there is an underlying imperativeness when the time for their blossoming romance is shortened by Adam leaving the country in the morning. The film is the kind of coming-of-age spurred by the event of meeting someone that makes you want to come to that age of knowing what a freed identity feels like. The magnetism between Kol and Adam is hopeful, so much so that when they meet again at a party only hours after seemingly saying their last goodbyes, Live’s “Lightning Crashes” playing in the background almost sounds romantic and serendipitous.

Though the romance is the marketing center of the film, the little details that indicate that the world is changing around the characters are supplemental to the story’s vitality. There is a nine-year time lapse where Kol (who has a subtle physical change that completely changes his profile and confidence from his teenage version) returns to Australia for Ebony’s wedding and sees Adam (who looks the same and yet smaller) in the airport. On the drive home, Kol mentions that he only talks to his mom after coming out, which is a stark note of absence from the busy multi-generational household portrayed prior. A racist girl that Kol met at the party nearly a decade ago is now married to a Serbian, with little indication of her flippant remarks to Kol when she was younger. It’s these kinds of changes that can feel dissociative for people whose relationships with others operate on memories. Still, it’s unreasonable to hold people to their younger selves, and Of an Age does well to remind us that this is how life goes.

From the beginning, Kol and Adam are on different trajectories. We don’t fully see whether their romance plays a part to anything grander than its momentum, which can make their one-night acquaintance feel like a wholesome fluke. The only sort of stable thing that brings them together is, coincidentally, Ebony, who doesn’t seem to be a good friend to Kol or thoughtful sister to Adam (I’d like to mention that Hook plays the character with a high-speed hysteria that provides refreshing interludes in this slow-burn tale). She draws Kol in again and again: to rescue her from the beach and miss the competition, to accompany her to a house party where he smokes weed for the first time and is abandoned by the partygoers, to be part of her wedding after not talking to him for years, and to the reconciliation of their younger years. In these collisions, Adam is there: he takes him to that beach, he finds a high Kol stumbling down the street and takes him home, he looks at him longingly across the dancefloor when they’re both older and not together.

There are different reasons that stop two people from being together. Of an Age seems less engaged in rearranging the mechanical gears in characters’ lives for one romantic endeavor to survive and more into the ebb and flow of growth and setbacks. In Stolevski’s world, conflicts and emotion float in a dreamlike state. You Won’t Be Alone is dreamy-extraterrestrial and alienating. Of an Age is the mind game you play when you are about to sleep: the one where you rewind back to the memories that you think about the most, wondering if and how things could have been different.

Of an Age
2022
dir. Goran Stolevski
99 min.

Opens Friday, 2/17 @ Capitol Theatre, West Newton Cinema, Kendall Square Cinema, and AMC Boston Common
Read the Hassle’s interview with director Goran Stolevski here!