Cocoon review – seductive coming-of-age story full of reveries

This is nothing to do with Ron Howard’s movie about Don Ameche being rejuvenated by aliens. German director Leonie Krippendorff has created a coming-of-age awakening in the 2018 summer of love, with swimming-pool rapture, yearning bedroom reveries and rooftop party scenes in the Kotti Kreuzberg, Berlin’s Kottbusser Tor district. There are also some noodling YA-style video-journaling inserts, which are an acquired taste. It’s a bit derivative and the metaphor in the title is right on the nose – but Cocoon is also seductive and well-acted.

Fourteen-year- old Nora ( Lena Urzendowsky) nerdishly keeps caterpillars in jars in her bedroom, the sort of childish hobby that many people of her age have junked in favour of Instagram. She hangs out with her older sister Jule (Lena Klenke) and Jule’s friend Aylin (Elina Vildanova) who tolerate her, just about. Nora and Jule are pretty much abandoned to their own devices by their alcoholic mum Vivienne (Anja Schneider), who is bleary to the point of being comatose, but a birthday gift she receives from an old friend hints at a more complex intellectual past: Judith Butler’s book Bodies That Matter.

Poor Nora disgraces herself one day in school when she gets her first period in middle of gym class, and the person who comes to her aid afterwards is

super-cool Romy, played by Jella Haase, and it isn’t long before Nora and Romy are texting and hanging out and Nora realises that she likes Romy an awful lot. But is Romy just as into boys? Urzendowsky is very good as part of a young and vivid cast and the extended dreamy scenes with nothing much happening – or perhaps everything happening – are well managed.

The film conforms to the coming-of-age template in that romance is followed or superseded by friendship and maturing personal growth. Urzendowsky keeps it all together.

• Cocoon is released on 11 December in cinemas and on digital formats.