J-horror films frequently feature schools and teenage girls, with the former providing spooky settings and the latter blood-curdling screams. Mari Asato, for example, set her 2014 film “Fatal Frame” in a Catholic boarding school for girls, with Gothic atmospherics that elevated it above run of mill genre outings.

A similar dynamic is at work in Yukari Sakamoto’s “White Flowers and Fruits,” an assured if patchy first feature. But the film, which revolves around the suicide of a popular student at a Protestant all-girls boarding school, also resembles Peter Weir’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (1975) and Sofia Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides” (1999), dramas in which teenage girls die from causes that are baffling to those around them but do not involve a single jump scare.

Based on Sakamoto’s original script, the film unfolds in a private, feminine space while the adolescent protagonists are universal types, from the intensity of their friendships to the turbulence of their emotions. Theirs is also a world in which adults, be they stiff authority figures or clueless parents, are viewed as interlopers. Men hardly figure, even as fantasy crushes on wall posters or screen savers. (This may be the only contemporary Japanese teen film in which the female characters have no online access whatsoever.)

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