This searing drama about youth at risk in smalltown Ireland marks the auspicious feature debut of director Aoife McArdle, a rising star who brings a lush, sensuous eye to even the darkest scenarios. Featuring an arresting performance from Ann Skelly, Kissing Candice is about a girl growing up in a very scary place — and the imaginings that might literally represent her only way out.

Seventeen-year-old Candice (Skelly) is a dreamer, and the dreams she has during her chronic seizures are the most lucid of all. In one, she meets a beautiful sleepwalking boy. It’s a dream she can’t shake off, especially given the nature of her reality. Candice longs to escape this gloomy seaside town still reeling from the disappearance of a local boy. “Things were a lot safer here during the Troubles,” Candice’s police detective father (John Lynch) proclaims, referring to the violence regularly wreaked by a vicious gang. Candice’s world seems to brighten when she meets a man who perfectly resembles her sleepwalker — until she learns he is part of the very gang her father is determined to abolish.