A green utopia on the outskirts of Stuttgart. With its untouched, deathly still forests and crumbling buildings, it’s a slice of tranquil heaven. It’s a far cry from the school that Lukas (Florian Geißelmann) and his friend Andi (Anton Petzold) attend. There, the shy but tolerated former boy has to witness the constant bullying of the latter. Andi not only stands out as the new kid carrying excess weight; he clearly has issues controlling himself in stressful situations and resorts to violence. “I’m going to kill you all!” he is seen screaming at his peers in a video circulating around the school.

There’s a tough choice in store for one of the three protagonists of Jannis Lenz’s Oasis, which has premiered in the Orizzonti section of the 83rd Venice Film Festival. After all, we’ve seen the news reports and the profiling of those who became radicalised at school – those “outsiders” who shot people. The fact that Lenz keeps orbiting this fundamental question of Andi’s true nature is at the same time a strength and one of the weaker elements of the movie.

When he’s together with Lukas and his friend Maja (Mathilda Smidt), Andi seems to be at peace, running and biking through their green oasis, playing paintball, smoking weed, and engaging in obscure rituals of touching hands and paintball remnants. These are kids who are estranged from their parents and looking for emotional and physical comfort in each other, one can deduce. At the same time, the artistic ambition here sometimes slips into over-stylisation.

The more nuanced and focused part of the story revolves around the conflicts on the adult side. Lukas’s father, Martin (Godehard Giese), is Andi’s form teacher and takes little joy in the fact that his son is becoming fast friends with Andi. While he does not outright condemn Andi, as many other parents do, his overprotection and constant interrogations do start driving a wedge between him and Lukas. That is, until Lukas starts acting more reclusive, and it might be too late for him. It’s a tightrope, and Lenz’s script, which he wrote with Alexander Dirninger, further intensifies that feeling by unfurling the chaos the video has unleashed in the school. Especially once a second one turns up, which shows Andi as a bullying victim, naked, with his clothes hidden, out of reach.

In an education system that has sworn not to look away any more, but has few ways of dealing with conflict other than introducing more regulations, holding discussions and taking disciplinary action, one can sense the frustration the movie is trying to convey. These people really do want to help, but in following all of the necessary steps, the very ones affected by it can get left behind. As one father, determined to get Andi kicked out, puts it: do all of these social sensitivity workshops thrown at the kids ever really change anything?

It is up to the viewer to pass judgement on whether the peaceful and insecure Andi we see in the woods reflects the boy’s true nature, and whether the logical villain here is a world that is trying to push a stifling body of rules onto a misfit. Or does the fact that he reacts to stress and provocation with unhinged violence mean he can’t paper over the cracks? In the end, and this is Lenz’s final trick, a completely new vantage point amidst this slow-paced escalation gives us a fresh perspective that will linger. Ultimately, when it comes to conflicts like these, there are no definitive answers.

Oasis was produced by Germany’s Zeitgeist Filmproduktion and Third Picture, and Austria’s Wega Filmproduktion. It is sold internationally by Totem Films.