EDGE OF FIFTEEN: On a recommendation from Kindertrauma, I watched the 1969 suspense flick I Start Counting–and found a melancholic, adolescent movie, all elbows and knees and awkward longing for what used to be and what is still to come.

The basic story: In a small English town where the old houses are being torn down for redevelopment, a Catholic schoolgirl begins to suspect that her (adoptive? step-?) older brother, on whom she has a severe crush, is the local serial killer. The movie portrays England as a culture in its awkward adolescence, childishly trying on big-girl sexy clothes, unaware that its panties are showing. The mystery moves quickly and yet the movie itself feels quiet and lingering, with the girl going back to her ruined childhood home and swaying back and forth in the backyard swing, or bumping her way down the staircase on her bottom after her first encounter with pale ale.

The movie’s portrayal of adolescent girls’ sexuality is surprisingly sensitive, maybe because it’s based on a novel by a woman. Wynne and her friend Corinne skitter nervously from tarting themselves up and enjoying boys’ and men’s attention to pulling away when masculine aggression goes from thrilling to scary. The movie shows, quickly and fairly subtly, how often men pass off their threats as “only protecting you.” These teenage girls’ skins prickle when they’re around certain older men, but they’re also still the kind of foolish virgins who brag about how many men they’ve slept with.

The movie’s flaws pretty much all come in the actual suspense/killer narrative. The two twists are both handled somewhat clumsily, the main villain’s Big Villain Speech is wrong-footed in several different ways (although his final line is unexpected and good), and the pacing is strange. I didn’t feel much suspense by the time we start finding out what really happened. That’s fine (and anyway Kindertrauma disagrees, so you might as well), since I was so invested in the characters and their emotional journeys, but just know that this is a thriller in which a shot of a bulldozer plowing over a sewing machine is much more intense than the reveal of the killer.