It might unfold primarily in a psychiatric unit, but make no bones about it: 15/18 is a high school movie. Cédric Kahn’s verité-style drama eschews the typical pathologizing that comes with the territory of treating teenage mental maladies. In this Parisian ward treating patients aged 15 through 18, everyone is defined as a person before being reduced to a social problem. Apart from the dosing of pharmaceutical treatments, this might as well be a boarding school with its cafeteria table politics and bunk-bed confessions.

After extensive research with co-writer Kahina Le Querrec, Kahn models this fictional facility on those that adopt a more humane, conversational approach to tackling each patient’s needs. It’s not a total institution that strips them of individuality. What emerges in these dialogues is a dual understanding of their traumas, reflective of the complex web of social and psychological factors contributing to troubled youth. Their afflictions often stem from race, class, gender, and more — making 15/18 a unique microcosm of emerging trends percolating through French society at large.

Kahn models this democratic system in his film’s very structure, ensuring each character has a chance to be heard in their own right while also understanding how they fit into the broader social fabric. The world-building setup 15/18 recalls the incisive observational documentary work of the late Frederick Wiseman, who sought to capture ecosystems more than conventional narratives inside institutional settings. Kahn’s camera rarely captures anything exceptionally revelatory or novel, but the gaze always feels truthful and tender.

The film eventually settles on a few protagonists to follow with greater depth. Unsurprisingly, the character who the camera tracks in on the opening shot – Lucia, played by Wild Diamond breakout Malou Khebizi – emerges as a major focus. This firecracker is exactly the type of combustible, chimerical case who poses a challenge for the staff. For their new intern, Jules (Antoine de Foucauld), she offers quite a dose of reality to the idealistic notion of joining this speciality because working with teens seems more ​“joyful.”

But no one tests the boundaries of compassion and care quite like the slick Enzo (Kenji Peyran), a manipulative young man who checks himself into the facility to circumvent the penal system. No one doubts that he needs psychiatric help, but the more experienced counselors recognize his potential to exploit them as a means to avoid, not assume, accountability for his actions. Enzo becomes something of a Randall McMurphy-type figure on the wing, capable of galvanizing his peers and gaming his overseers. And since he’s just shy of turning eighteen, at which point the law deems him an adult, his impending birthday becomes something of a ticking time bomb.

Kahn’s camera remains almost exclusively inside the walls of the facility, so much so that a shot following the patients watching out the window as their friend gets discharged strikes like a radical break in form. But that’s nothing compared to the final act’s big twist, which shakes up the setting entirely. A secondary character, sexual assault survivor Éloïse (Zoé Monpart), comes to dominate this stretch. Her journey proves the truth of the film’s secondary title, A Place to Heal, albeit ironically only from outside its auspices.