The question "why am I different?" is often at the core of every adolescent's journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance. Our gawky teenage years are filled with vain attempts at fitting in, standing out, finding someone and hopefully, finding ourselves. With the advent of internet search engines and databases, it's tempting to believe that profoundly personal questions about the things that make us different can be objectively answered - if you could just do the right research.
Noam Stein is a teenage boy searching for answers to who he is, and why. To be fair, he is many things: an orthodox jew attending his last year of Yeshiva, a smart student, a singer in a community choir, and a brother to a sister who is about to get married. And then there's this other little thing about him: he also happens to be privately gay. Or is it more complicated? Is he a gay orthodox jew? A gay student in Yeshiva? A gay singer in a choir? Why would that one feature manage to change everything? That may be a broader theme to ponder, but for Noam, the question is more basic: why am I like this?
Noam believes he may have stumbled upon a major clue when he discovers an old box left behind by his recently deceased grandfather. There's a note inside written in German, signed by the cryptic "M," a secret compartment with a photograph of two men, and an engagement ring. Who is this "M" that no one has talked about and what does the note say about his grandfather's past?
To Noam, unlocking that past by solving the riddle of his grandfather's box may also be the key to understanding his present self. His grandfather was closer to him than anyone else and shared many of his traits, including a love for old broadway tunes and love songs. Could it be that they shared other traits that no one in their conservative, orthodox family would ever dare acknowledge? Noam wants answers in that feverish, damn-the-torpedos way that typifies teenage zeal. To get there, he enlists the aid of his classmate, Jonah, an egg-headed, history-buff, towards whom Noam secretly harbors a crush, on the premise that they are doing a school project. Together they make an amiable team of detectives in which the subtlety of their "are they/aren't they" interaction is deftly filmed and perfectly acted.
Coming of age films work best when the journey supersedes the goal. We all grow up - it's how one person gets there that makes for an interesting story. One could argue that the story of a closeted, gay teenager is nothing new or worth telling (again) in 2024. But writer/director Jeremy Borison's feature film debut defies our expectations of the genre by focussing on the internal conflicts that exist universally inside the teenage mind and its search for self acceptance. Noam is a smart, modern-day youth living in a conservative culture where being gay is still much less accepted. Through Borison's lens, we simultaneously observe a conservative world where coming out is significantly harder, set inside a liberal world, in which Noam's non-jewish, gay choir mate has the freedom to be unabashedly flamboyant. These two worlds live contemporaneously in Unspoken, without disparaging the other, and help to remind us that our expectations from living in "the world of today" are not universally held.
Yet, Noam's bigger demon is his own teenage angst. For this reason, Unspoken doesn't feel like an LGBTQ film except in the periphery. Rather, everything that makes Noam different becomes a relatable feature of a typical teenager - that person we all once were during those often excruciating adolescent years - confused, moody, excitable and oh-so-hard on ourselves. The irony of feeling different is that it blinds us to our universal sameness. Requiring us to recognize differences has its place, but there is a power in whispering certain truths that you don't get from shouting them. Unspoken speaks its message softly as it gradually leads us toward the realization that sometimes the answers to life's most important questions come, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
