This is extremely effective "novelistic" cinema. As writer/adaptor and director, Sofia Coppola manages POV with deft elasticity, deploying subjective experience through an undisclosed voiceover narrator while approaching onscreen plot in a quasi-omniscient, panoramic style (the omniscience is necessarily limited [quasi] because it's obscured by adolescent confusion, the inscrutability of tragedy, and collective social blindness).

It might be obvious to acknowledge Coppola as a uniquely skilled filmmaker of visual texture, given her passion for photography, design, and fashion, but the key is how she consolidates those interests in a cinematic context; here, her highly specific aesthetic vision lends itself to the paradoxically vivid and distanced psychological landscape of teenage fear, the process of viewing the world from abstract and romantic distance while also acutely feeling the traumas of its cruel randomness.

Aside from a few moments of slightly obvious comedy, the performances and dialogues harmonize beautifully with Coppola's audiovisual imagination, a hypnotizing dreaminess humming with a constant, nuanced undercurrent of pain.