Brothers and sisters can be a blessing and a curse – this appears to be Emi Buchwald’s leitmotif in her first feature, No Ghosts on Good Street, a gentle coming-of-age flick that is part of the SMART7 competition (see the news) and is currently being presented at the Kino Pavasaris Film Festival in Vilnius. On the one hand, it feels soothing and somehow comforting that these four siblings, as one collective protagonist in the film, seem as though they would never abandon one another; but it is precisely this certainty that produces a suffocating effect, as if full maturity and independence might never arrive.

Benek (Bartłomiej Deklewa) and Franek (Tymoteusz Rożynek) tried to live as best friends, but that can be a risky endeavour between brothers, and in this case, it has ended in alienation. In Franek’s absence, Benek feels betrayed and lonely in the vast flat, suffering from panic attacks and bad dreams like those in Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare, which he contemplates in a museum, while Franek himself by turns uses and gives up drugs, and drifts in and out of his relationship with his girlfriend. Naturally, all of this put together affects Franek’s twin sister, Nastka (Izabella Dudziak), eternally preoccupied with her inborn “other half” and, as a result, emotionally unavailable in her own intimate relationships.

Jana (Karolina Rzepa) seems to be the only one trying to maintain some kind of sane emotional distance, yet she is always there whenever someone needs to crash on her sofa or get a ride somewhere, while at the same time processing the whole web of mutual entanglements through an exhibition she is preparing.

The above is a rather simplified sketch of the plot’s skeleton, which is, in any case, not the most essential component, as the film revels in the emotional fluctuations around these events and in the silently evolving dynamics among the siblings. The narrative is fractured, split into uneven chapters with descriptive titles, maintaining a naively poetic tone like that of a teenage diary, which is in tune with the stage of early adulthood that the characters inhabit. DoP Tomasz Gajewski’s camera observes delicately, through close-ups and discreet angles, never intruding and intuitively sensing, rather than interrogating the characters’ emotional states.

In fact, the most endearing quality of No Ghosts on Good Street is that it does not analyse or dissect relationships, but simply follows the characters, allowing them to grow at their own pace and arrive at their own truths. There is no need for a deep dive into their “biographies” – the parents are mentioned only once, when the four of them return from visiting them and remark on the consequences of ageing. This, in turn, leaves the viewer with the sense that Buchwald and her co-writer Karol Marczak developed the screenplay intuitively, without excessive prior deliberation, in order to remain close to the ephemeral fabric of life. Consciously or not, in doing so, they also approach what may be cinema’s most meaningful essence: to capture the inexpressible from the fragments of life it recreates, all while maintaining a high degree of authenticity.

No Ghosts on Good Street was produced by Poland’s Studio Munka in co-production with Canal+ Polska, Fixafilm and Dreamsound.