This delicate German coming-of-ager – adapted by director Jakob Erwa from an Andreas Steinhöfel novel – wobbles between genuinely cute and aggravatingly twee before finding its feet alongside its protagonist. Sensitive late-teen Phil (Louis Hofmann) returns from camp one summer to find the small town he’d thought a paradise irrevocably altered: a storm has rearranged his usual reference points, distancing beloved sister Dianne (Ada Philine Stappenbeck) and leaving free-spirit mother Glass (Sabine Timoteo) even more emotionally fragile than when he left.

There is one ray of light in sporty new kid Nicholas (Jannik Schümann), enthusiastically leading our boy into the locker-room showers, but we’re set to wondering whether Phil’s tangled history will darken even this glimmer of promise. Flashbacks to Phil and Dianne’s days as Teutonically blond toddlers are proofs of baggage but feel unnecessary, and Erwa is prone to occasional visual cliches, like the overhead shot of semi-clad bodies atop a jetty that seems to recur in every Mitteleuropean drama about first fumbling love. Yet he establishes an intriguing, complicated and capably performed relationship between a mother who’s known only hurt from the opposite sex and a son palpably longing for male affection and affirmation. A vaguely educative, afterschool-special vibe may mean the 15 certificate reflects its optimal viewer age – it’s partly couched as a primer in handling heartbreak – but Erwa’s emotional candour ensures his film will strike resonant chords with anybody who spent their formative years extricating themselves from strangulating family ties.