Summer, 1976. A bourgeois German family gathers to mark the passing of their elderly matriarch. At their countryside home, the days are meant to unfold with quiet leisure. But, like the hazy heat that suggests an inevitable storm, conflicts between the family members can’t be contained.

In this multi-generational milieu—the devoted but pensively sad older Ilse; the middle-aged couple Bernd and Eva; single mother Gitti who has kept her sensuality; the frolicking but also ever-observing kids, Jana and Inge—writer-director Sonja Maria Kröner’s camera seamless shifts between points of view. Laden with an inescapable sense of melancholia, in The Garden Kröner leaves, as her characters do, much of the drama unspoken and lingering in the air.