Call Me by Your Name

About the film

Contains story spoilers.

In the summer of 1983, seventeen-year-old Elio Perlman spends long, unhurried days at his family’s villa in northern Italy. He reads, transcribes music, swims, and spends time with Marzia, a local friend. Oliver, a twenty-four-year-old American graduate student, arrives to assist Elio’s father, an archaeology professor, with academic work. Oliver is confident and sociable in a way that initially seems unlike Elio, who watches people closely and keeps much of his thinking private. Their shared house gives the film a setting where attraction develops through everyday proximity: meals, walks, conversations, and the ordinary traffic of family and visitors rather than a sequence of dramatic declarations.

Elio pays close attention to Oliver’s gestures but does not at first know how to interpret them. A touch during a volleyball game and Oliver’s flirtation with Chiara stir jealousy; Elio tries to occupy himself with music, reading, and time with Marzia. He and Oliver accompany Elio’s father on an archaeological trip and gradually find more reasons to spend time together. Elio’s attraction moves between observation and uncertainty, while Oliver’s easy manner can appear inviting one moment and distant the next. The film lets small shifts in attention carry weight, showing Elio’s emotional development through his changing focus rather than telling us that he has already understood what he wants.

Elio eventually tells Oliver that he has feelings for him. Oliver initially says they should not discuss those feelings, though they subsequently kiss away from the household. His reluctance to go further leads to several days of silence, leaving Elio unsure whether their moment together will become anything more. Elio also continues spending time with Marzia, and those choices affect her even as he tries to keep his feelings private. A note from Elio reopens communication with Oliver, who asks him to meet at night. Their relationship becomes mutual and intimate, but the film handles it through looks, silences, and shared time rather than explicit detail. Elio’s emotional experience is intense partly because he cannot assume what Oliver will choose when the summer ends.

The summer moves forward through familiar places made newly charged by their relationship: the villa’s rooms and garden, the town, nearby roads, and the landscape around the family’s archaeological work. Oliver and Elio travel together to Bergamo for several days as Oliver’s stay approaches its end. Their time away gives them a temporary space apart from the Perlman household and from the schedule that brought Oliver to Italy. The film keeps their age difference and different points in life visible without reducing the relationship to a single explanation. Oliver has an academic career and a home across the Atlantic; Elio is still with his parents and is encountering this depth of attachment for the first time.

When Oliver leaves, Elio returns to the family home and struggles with the abrupt change. His father recognizes his unhappiness and speaks to him with uncommon openness, acknowledging that Elio has experienced a rare bond and encouraging him not to shut himself off from future feeling. Marzia also reassures Elio that she remains his friend, and she is willing to remain friends despite being hurt by his earlier distance. Those conversations widen the film’s focus beyond the romance: the people around Elio do not simply vanish when the relationship ends, and their care helps him absorb what has happened. The family’s openness offers support without pretending it can reverse Oliver’s departure.

During the winter holiday, Oliver calls the Perlman family and says he is engaged to a woman he has been dating. The conversation reconnects the two men across a season and a continent, but it also confirms that their summer cannot continue unchanged. Elio and Oliver address each other in a way that recalls the intimacy they shared, and Oliver says he remembers everything. After the call, Elio sits by the fireplace as the household prepares dinner around him. The film ends there, holding on his face as he absorbs the news. His expression changes while voices and movement continue nearby, allowing grief, affection and recollection to occupy the same image. The uninterrupted attention to his face makes this private aftermath as important as the moments the couple spent together.

Luca Guadagnino’s film follows the rhythm of a summer rather than a tightly compressed plot, allowing rooms, meals, music, and changing light to register the days passing. The northern Italian villa and surrounding countryside create an atmosphere of ease, but the story remains attentive to how private a first attachment can feel even inside a busy household. James Ivory’s screenplay adapts André Aciman’s novel with particular attention to what people hesitate to say. Elio’s musical confidence offers a revealing contrast to his uncertainty in conversation: at the piano he can vary a phrase deliberately, while an encounter with Oliver leaves him searching for the right response. Timothée Chalamet, Armie Hammer, and Michael Stuhlbarg anchor its shifting relationships; the father’s late conversation with Elio becomes a counterweight to the loss, offering permission to remember the summer without requiring Elio to deny his grief. The final held image lets ordinary family activity continue behind him, keeping heartbreak within a world that carries on.