‘Coming of age’ films are plentiful in modern-day cinema, and Stelios Kammitsis’ JERKS follows this well-trodden path to examine three friends at a critical juncture in their lives, on the eve of their planned departure from Athens to Berlin.

Phivos (Giorgos Kafetzopoulos), whose story the film focuses on, is an escapist who attempts to construct his life as if it were a screenplay. He acts as narrator in what Kammitsis calls “a film within a film” that follows the trio through the night-time, as their plans slowly but surely unravel. Phivos, Savvas (Diogenis Skaltsas) and Andreas (Aineias Tsamatis) have been friends since childhood, but are finding that adult responsibility, be it in the form of planned marriage or unplanned pregnancy, is intruding upon their wish to escape Athens.

The film works best when it focuses on the relationship between Phivos and his ex-girlfriend Fotini (Ioanna Kolliopoulou), which is tender and nuanced. A dream-like, deliberately stylised scene in which Phivos spots Fotini across a crowd of dancers marks out Kammitsis as a director with some promise.

A dream-like, deliberately stylised scene in which Phivos spots Fotini across a crowd of dancers marks out Kammitsis as a director with some promise.

However, the film’s structure, whilst allowing for such scenes, can also be its downfall, with both dialogue and scenes coming across as theatrical and forced. The English subtitles also lose some of the flavour of the Greek slang, which does not help the feeling of stiltedness.

Kammitsis has to be commended for making the most out of his first-time cast and the real-life locales used, with graffiti-scrawled streets and empty, dusty hillside respectively underlining the characters’ wish to escape to a better life, and how they are at a remove from the world of the city.

In the end, JERKS is about how best laid plans can be unravelled in an instant. It’s a message that is conveyed with more brutal force in Mathieu Kassovitz’s LA HAINE, which similarly focused on three young men over the course of a single day. Kammitsis’ film owes a debt to its French predecessor.