Outside Noise review – dreamy twentysomethings wander around Europe in charming study

The lethargy of summer hangs pleasantly over Ted Fendt’s ruminative snapshot of quarter-life aimlessness. With a brief beginning in New York, the film drifts between the streets of Berlin and Vienna as it follows a trio of twentysomething women caught at the crossroads of intellectual and creative pursuits. Mia (Mia Sellman), Daniela (Daniela Zahlner), and Natascha (Natascha Manthe) amble their way through sleepless nights, listless strolls and awkward gatherings, and the film refreshingly posits their unmoored state not as a source of narrative tension, but a natural way of being.

The milieu of Outside Noise is specific; here is a world where everyone seems to be a writer, an artist or a graduate student with an existential crisis. Their central dilemma is echoed in the subject of Mia’s postgraduate thesis, which is concerned with the idea of liminal stages. At the same time, the film is charmingly self-aware about its own infatuation with western European cities and culture. In a humorous touch of autobiography, Fendt casts himself in a brief appearance as an American visitor, overenthusiastically rattling off a list of must-visit Vienna spots to a stunned Natascha.

At times, the camera embarks on its own kind of wandering, straying from the women to take in a fluttering tree on a pavement or the fleeting beauty of a sunbeam on a windowsill. Rendered on 16mm film stock, these moments of urban serendipity, as well as minor personal frictions, glow with a warm vitality. Like a summer breeze, Outside Noise might be modest in cope, yet it brings a refreshing new look to the landscape of independent film-making.

• Outside Noise is at the ICA, London, from 2 August.