Starring Sarah Hagan and Austin Vickers. Unrated. Opens Friday, March 2, at the Pacific Cinémathèque

There's much to admire in this ultra–low-key tale of childhood on a Kentucky tobacco plantation. Using his own family surroundings, and with limited resources, writer-director Clay Jeter—an actor who has also shot and directed music videos—exploits varied and wonderfully degraded film stock to create evocative, colour-saturated images.

Okay, that's it for the film-school portion of the review. The kids who constitute the titular second cousins likewise look perfect in this sun-dappled and barn-shaded context. But their acting is truly atrocious, and the few repetitive lines handed them convey neither drama nor basic psychology. I was surprised to see that Sarah Hagan, who plays the older, nascently sexual Jess, has had regular employment on TV (most notably on Freaks and Geeks); she brings no more authority to the screen than does total newcomer Austin Vickers as the younger, more curious Moss, whose parents apparently died in a car crash.

Very little is clear regarding their past, let alone future, in the atmospherically nonlinear flow of Jess + Moss. But Jeter's anarchic structure has the aesthetic virtue of making you feel it's your fault for not grasping more and your virtue for reading into it more than meets the eye—which is, to be fair, plenty.

In fact, so much care has gone into framing the nostalgia-laden, golden-lit scenes of this uneasy twosome exploring overgrown fields, shotgun shacks, and rundown farm equipment, you have to conclude that Jeter simply didn't care about words or how flatly they would be dropped from his hazily drawn characters' mouths.

The little flashbacks, the audiotape Jess plays obsessively, the haunting piano score, the collagelike repetition, and hints of age-inappropriate flirtation between children—well, they're all suggestive of feelings and facts never quite thought through or fully realized. This film's so damn indie, it's almost Canadian.

Watch the trailer for Jess + Moss.