Leonardo Van Dijl’s first feature casts young athlete Tessa Van den Broeck as a player whose own trauma is heightened by a fellow academy member’s suicide.

Belgian director Leonardo Van Dijl’s assured debut feature, Julie Keeps Quiet, builds a riveting psychological drama around the choice of a star player from an elite youth tennis academy not to speak up in the wake of tragedy. In her first acting role, young tennis ace Tessa Van den Broeck internalizes the title character’s brooding unease with slow-burn intensity. The movie’s silence is so loaded with the anxiety, obstinance, inchoate anger and desire for anonymity of the traumatized teenage sportswoman that the constant thwack of her racquet hitting the ball cuts through the tension like violent shocks.

The Dardenne Brothers served as co-producers and there are faint echoes of their stripped-down narratives and rigorously naturalistic performances from a sturdy ensemble in which the teenage characters are played by nonprofessionals. Cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis shoots the film with what appears to be natural light wherever possible, meaning Julie is often enveloped in shadow.

Already something of an outsider given that she’s a scholarship player subsidized by the tuition fees of rich kids, Julie becomes more guarded as she parses — or buries? — her complicated feelings about recent events. Chief among them is the suicide of Aline, a 16-year-old academy member also coached by Jeremy, seen projecting sunny self-confidence in a video about her hopes to join the Belgian Tennis Federation. While preparing for her own upcoming BTF trials, Julie rewatches that video obsessively.

The head of the academy, Sophie (Claire Bodson), informs the students that outside mediators are being brought in to launch an internal investigation and conduct interviews, in the aim of promoting more open dialogue and fostering a safe environment. But the organization’s staff also appear to be treading cautiously, wary of being implicated should major transgressions come to light.

That seems increasingly likely once word gets out that Jeremy has been suspended, and while Julie initially remains in contact with him by phone, she keeps those conversations to herself.

One of the strengths of Van Dijl’s film is that it also keeps quiet about what happened, even if it’s indicated unequivocally in Jeremy’s sole scene, when he meets up with Julie in a café to talk. That unsettling encounter is effectively shot in low light, with the two characters almost in silhouette.

The murky areas of the player-coach dynamic are fertile terrain for thorny drama, which is paradoxically amplified because Julie’s lips remain sealed. The fact that first Aline and then Julie were pushed forward as star talent and given solo training sessions with Jeremy suggests that in prioritizing the potential for academy players to break into professional tennis, the institution was lax in its supervisory role.

In short, punchy scenes played out with unerring restraint, the movie observes Julie practicing her serves, doing physical therapy for an injury or working out at the gym, all of which point to her using sport as a coping mechanism.