Similarly, Take Me Somewhere Nice—shot by DP Emo Weemhoff—cuts its Tupperware formalism with vivid, bodily interludes. There’s a tongue-forward make-out sesh; a post-brawl screw on a bed of white rocks. The camera’s angular placement conveys Alma’s sexual escapades with a silly, sloppy, spirited gusto, the kind teenage hookups tend to have. One of my favorite things about Sendijarević’s debut is that Alma doesn’t come off like a hapless virgin who progressively learns how to own her sexuality; rather, her sexual coming-of-age is a matter of sifting through her ambiguous desires, understanding what it feels like to hold contradictory feelings, and see them play out by flesh. Sendijarević hits this funny chord by presenting her journey as a long spell of dissociation, achieved in part by the affectless performances and vacant settings. I thought of Aki Kaurismäki, the way his films stare blank-faced at the absurdities of social life, but Sendijarević’s romp is swept with millennial pastels and anchored by a baby-faced protagonist, who is still learning how to hunger. 

When the film starts, Alma’s father is reportedly in the hospital a few hours south of Sarajevo, which prompts her travels. She must confront her estranged father and, by extension, return to her childhood home. Immediately upon landing, there’s, well, nothing. Just an empty parking lot and her cousin Emir (Ernad Prnjavorac), like a blip on a radar, essentially twiddling his thumbs in his beat-up car. Sendijarević captures the overarching feeling of postwar Bosnian malaise through uncanny, wryly suggestive images that never surrender their connection to everyday life: dozens of used water bottles scattered around Emir’s apartment; a pair of spare keys buried in potting soil. Irritatingly, jobless Emir is “too busy” to drive Alma to her father, prompting a series of misadventures that intensify the film’s already-potent brew of absurdism. After being ditched by her bus, Alma briefly joins forces with a middle-aged woman, decked out in platinum blonde hair extensions, who becomes something like her mentor. The woman fled the country during the war, making ends meet as a prostitute, singer, artist—whatever worked. Sendijarević shows the two women bonding by poolside, her camera zoomed in on the woman’s skin as Alma applies sunscreen, hovering over her moles and birthmarks as an expression of her rich yet weathered life. 

At a club, we see Alma staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror next to glitzed-out adult women, her face, bare and rounded, next to their sharply contoured cheekbones and intense smacks of blush and lip color. Here, in particular, the oil-slicked visages and boozy, fluorescent visuals—all carrying a forlorn detachment—recall other contemporary coming-of-age films with a social-realist bent. Think How to Have Sex (2024) or Never Sometimes Rarely Always (2020), but situated in a lame Balkan villa of greasy politicians, lava-lamp cocktails, Eurotrash techno, and pleather-bound femmes with leathery tans. 

For the bulk of the film, however, Alma remains anchored to people her own age. Like hoodlums in the dark, Denis and Emir knock out an older suitor and “kidnap” Alma outside the club, placing the story on the tracks of an angsty-kids road movie complete with Sonic Youth needle drops, a secret stash of cocaine, and more confused fucking. None of this amounts to a reckoning; there’s no grand “a-ha!” as Alma and company decide how to fill up their time—and that’s partly what allows the film to surpass the trappings of its Bosnian specificity. Growing up is about learning how to exist with your broken pieces; finding peace with life’s open questions. There’s a moment toward the end when the trio wind up at a resort, funded by the sale of said cocaine stash. They attend a magic show in a room way too big for the scanty audience, lit, like the gates of heaven, by a pale, almost forensic blue light. Alma is chosen to partake in the next act—the classic body sawed in half bit, which, of course, plays into her fractured identity, shattered into even tinier bits throughout the trip. When the separation of the two boxes happens, she’s in shock. She thought she’d find out how it’s done. 

Beatrice Loayza is a writer and editor who contributes regularly to The New York Times, the Criterion Collection, Artforum, 4Columns, and other publications.