The intriguing central location of Anna Roller’s feature debut is an Italian village mysteriously abandoned, Marie Celeste-style, with its wardrobes still groaning with fur coats and its churches fully stocked with altar wine. It is a handy metaphor for “Dead Girls Dancing” itself, which, as a coming-of-age story, plays in heavily pre-trafficked territory, inheriting many of the trappings of the very many films that have preceded it — especially those dedicated to the growing pains of teenage girls exploring their nascent sexuality and the limits of their childhood bonds. But the clothes are borrowed and once they are politely returned, and the woozy contact high of Roller’s impressively confident, hip style wears off, there’s not a lot left that makes a lasting impression in a densely populated category. Just as these girls, however momentous their own experiences, will leave few traces of their presence on the stone streets and crumbling buildings of their temporary hideaway. 

We meet German teens Ira (Luna Jordan), Ka (Noemi Liv Nicolaisen), and Malin (Katharina Stark) on the day of their high-school graduation ceremony. They line up for their last school photo: As the flashbulb pops, Malin is smiling and feminine, Ka feisty and edgy, and Ira unsmiling and serious, looking a little ill at ease in her nice-girl dress. For the rest of the film, she’ll be in boyish shorts and T-shirts. Around her besties, of course, she’s a lot more relaxed. In the sun-splashed, windswept imagery, Roller and DP Felix Pflieger show an eye for a tableau of carelessly entangled togetherness, and there will be a lot of those as the trio heads to Italy, crammed into a little hatchback car to experience their first non-parentally supervised summer of adventure. 

Money is tight and the girls are always looking for ways to save a few euros, by camping where possible or even just begging some pull-up space so they can sleep in the car. But after successfully talking one motel owner into letting them park rent-free, they decide they’re in need of a shower. Ira approaches a young hitchhiker staying there, and asks to use her bathroom. She is Zoe (Sara Giannelli), and she agrees, and when they’re all caught smoking weed and chased, shrieking, out of the motel, she ends up making the threesome a foursome. That’s good news for Ira, whom we can tell, by her dazzled sideways glances, is attracted to the enigmatic newcomer. 

But then the car gets a flat on a remote hillside and, stranded until roadside services can arrive with a jack a day or two later, the girls follow the sound of church bells chiming and find their abandoned village paradise. At first they’re perplexed by the emptiness, but soon they succumb to the heady power of being like, as Malin sighs, “the last people in the world.” They set up home in a palazzo complete with old gramophone and closets full of prime dress-up costumes. They steal food from the corner minimarket (though they discuss leaving money for whatever they take) and pilfer enough altar wine to get the party going.

At this point in Roller’s screenplay, which has scudded along pleasantly enough till now, there’s the opportunity to go full-bore into moody “Virgin Suicides”-style surreality, with the girls creating a kind of “Lord of the Flies” situation as their first taste of adult independence is heightened by the exotic, limitless freedoms offered by their unusual discovery. So it’s a disappointment when the film pulls back from that brink — even the growing attraction between Ira and Zoe, and the hints at Ka’s jealousy, are dealt with chastely, timidly. And with the other characters only sketchily drawn in and rather self-absorbed — that the tattoo on Ka’s shoulder is simply the Chinese character for “me” seems apt — the film gets surprisingly plot-heavy in the final stretches, electing to explain a lot that might have more evocatively remained mysterious.  

With a story that is smaller and less transgressive than the punkish title promises, and despite attractive performances all round, the girls (Ira in particular) come out the other side looking less like transformed young adults and more like rather silly kids who have gone too far in a game of make-believe. And so, although its atmospheric stretches prove that Roller has a talent for crafting energetic, youthful cinema, it feels as though the film’s ultimate point of view is not that of its young characters, but of the resolutely unmagical, ordinary adult world to which they must return. It’s where we all already live, so it’s a pity “Dead Girls Dancing” doesn’t make a little more of its opportunity for escape.