Some films tell you a story. Jess + Moss does something rarer — it remembers a feeling, the exact texture of a childhood summer you may not have actually had.
Two cousins, one summer
The debut feature of director Clay Jeter, Jess + Moss portrays the solitary life of Jess (Sarah Hagan) and Moss (Austin Vickers), two second cousins living in rural Western Kentucky who come to share the same fears and hopes as they each cross into the next stage of adolescence. Without immediate families they can rely on, and lacking friends their own age, they have only each other. Across one long summer they venture into deep secrets and half-formed dreams of a future, shadowed all the while by fears of isolation, abandonment and an unknown tomorrow. It is a film about the preciousness of youth and all of its disasters.
A trancelike way of looking
What sets the film apart is its form. Jeter creates a lyrical tale, delicately layering ways of looking and listening: shifting planes of focus, select pieces of music, and expert sound design that calls attention to cryptic but suggestive details. The camera does not march through plot; it drifts, trancelike, along the fringes of memory, welling up emotion from small things — sun on a field, a held silence, the grain of the image itself. Amid the happy and the sad, it probes the heart and the mind the way memory actually works: in fragments, out of order, soaked in light.
Cinema as remembered sensation
This is filmmaking that trusts atmosphere over incident, closer to a tone poem than a conventional coming-of-age drama. The risk of such an approach is preciousness; Jeter mostly avoids it because the feeling underneath is real and specific — the particular loneliness of rural adolescence, the intensity of a friendship that is all you have. The film asks to be felt rather than followed, and rewards the viewer willing to meet it on those terms.
Reading it again in 2026
In an era of plot-engineered, algorithm-tuned content, a quiet, image-led film about two kids and a Kentucky summer feels almost radical — a defence of cinema as mood and memory rather than mere story delivery. It belongs in our archive with the other films and image-makers who privilege the lyrical over the literal, from the dark fairy tales of Catherine Breillat to the staged reveries of Alex Prager. Jess + Moss doesn't tell you about being young. For ninety minutes, it makes you remember it.