Review by Ian Keogh

Dennie and Tâm Nguyen are German citizens whose parents were born in Vietnam, Dennie at fourteen two years older than his sister. They have a chance encounter with a young Vietnamese woman in car, and several days later their friend Alex finds the contact details they supplied, along with a photograph of a happy couple in a bag we’ve seen thrown from a motorway bridge. When investigating further they discover a severed finger. It’s the start of a consistently absorbing character-based drama.

Considerable ambition is immediately apparent. The story would have worked with two German boys meeting an East European woman. With a name like Mikaël Ross, the creator presumably isn’t Vietnamese, yet he creates a thoroughly believable Vietnamese family down to the father objecting to Dennie’s Napalm Death t-shirt on the basis of what napalm did to his homeland during the Vietnamese war. Other small details add depth and intrigue, such as the story of German TV host Hans Rosenthal.

The eye-catching cover is a representation of a dramatic moment roughly halfway through the story, providing a suitably startling and intriguing image, but not one that greatly represents the loose, but detailed art within. It’s character-rich and evocative with several fast-moving action sequences, these being excellently conceived and choreographed to feature unusual moments. Ross has a great talent for creating atmosphere, at its most basic setting scenes at night or in the rain, but also via chosen locations and the general feeling of deprivation.

Working with a relatively small cast, most of whom only know each other vaguely to begin with, if at all, Ross systematically brings them closer together. Dennie and Tâm want to do the right thing, which in other parts of his life Dennie certainly isn’t doing, while Ross keeps adding complications, some of them emotionally unpredictable and heartbreaking. Tension remains high all the way to a rewarding final action scene. A bittersweet epilogue doesn’t catch up with everyone, but such is life.

Just in case it’s important, the title has nothing to do with the band Nirvana, and everything to do with a quoted line from a poem referring to the state of inner peace.

At it’s most basic Nirvana is Here is a cleverly constructed coming of age story, but it’s also a layered, cross-cultural experience where events develop naturally and believably yet are infused with whimsy and emotion, so transcends what it might have been.