With The Exploding Girl, director Bradley Rust Gray has picked a title that’s so evocative, it’s almost tasteless. The film focuses on Ivy (Zoe Kazan), home in Manhattan for a one-week break from her first year of college and uneasily negotiating the tricky transition from shy teenager to functioning adult. If Ivy’s burgeoning womanhood is the figurative explosion the title references, her epilepsy and its effects are the literal reference. Slowly, virtually subliminally but with a determinism reminiscent of a horror film, Gray builds up a sense of dread, but ultimately picks mystery over money shot. In the end, the title is by far the most explosive element (pun intended) of this beautifully restrained film.

Episodic and observational, Girl follows Ivy while she hangs out with her mom, and with the male best friend who may or may not be in love with her, and who she in turn may or may not love. She goes to parties, where she either drinks too much or not enough. She tries to reach her boyfriend from school but he doesn’t answer her calls; when he does, they make awkward small talk and he makes excuses. In between these activities, she spends time alone, apparently lost in thought, her specific emotions inscrutable behind Kazan’s all eyes-and-cheeks facade.

If it sounds like Girl is low on narrative incident, well, that’s because it is, but that doesn’t seem inappropriate for a film about a time of life when it feels as though nothing ever happens, and everything that does or doesn’t happen is subject to ample introspection. But it’s not “just” a naturalistic character study; in fact The Exploding Girl is a work of rigorous formalism. Shooting in real locations on the streets and rooftops of New York, Gray keeps his camera far away from Ivy when she’s in public, allowing his star to pop and weave in and out of layers of cars and strangers, the crush of city life both overwhelming her and protecting her. The film’s sound design amplifies this layering effect; the core of this film is the frustrated sadness that surrounds a long-awaited phone call finally coming in, only to have the voice at the other end of the cell virtually swallowed by the noise around you, the conversational flow choked by distance and uncertainty. The mundane events of Ivy’s days offer the filmmaker the opportunity to describe her inner life by heightening her experience of external space.

When the big bang, as it were, which seemed inevitable from the start finally happens, it serves the catalyst for a late-inning surge of emotion. By this point, Gray has told us in enough ways that Ivy’s number one priority as she moves through her days is to keep herself contained. Her ultimate explosion, the catharsis that the character needs in order to take a step that finds a common ground between her past and something approaching adulthood, is the audience’s relief.

The Tribeca Film Festival begins on Wednesday. The Exploding Girl has its first screening on Thursday night.