It’s hard to know where to begin in reviewing this show.

Should I mention the bombastic acting performances, which highlight the characters’ youth and inexperience with feeling quite so much, especially standing in sharp contrast to so many other Japanese shows? Which isn’t to say that they don’t do subtle as well; both mains have a mastery over micro-expressions that feel all the louder in their quiet, precise application.

Sound and silence are both balanced so well that the quiet spaces between words and glances may as well be a supporting character unto itself. The same could be said of water, particularly of the sea, as it is evoked in both words (voice-overs, dialogue, writing, and the main characters’ very names) and images (films, pictures, flashbacks, and day trips both apart and together) again and again, layered into each episode’s framing narration and the very color palette of the show itself.

It’s a visually breathtaking show as a whole. The camerawork is masterful—even when the uncertainty of a situation or scene could benefit from shaky cam, the cinematography team instead allows the camera to smoothly bob and flow as if launched into the sea like some message for help nestled in a bottle. The characters are thus depicted as left adrift in an ocean (a world) far bigger than themselves as they try treading water until their feet find the bottom once more.

Equally impactful are the moments of stillness, just as the moments of silence. Japanese media often utilizes empty space and this show is no different, yet the effect is especially pronounced here as it further leaves the main characters isolated and alone, without the care of anyone tasked to love them, small and vulnerable and lonely whenever they’re apart. They’re made small and thus so, so young in the face of this silence-emptiness combination. Their vulnerability is so pure that you cannot help but empathize and root for them to reach a place of connection—a place back within the embrace of each other.

I should also mention the device of story and storytelling as a meta nod to this story itself. Haruki mythologizes his own situation to give himself strength and hope enough to endure. Jin’s father is a director who is too caught up in his own legend to see the truth—the emptiness—of his son’s life. Again and again we are shown the power of a story to save lives just as this too is itself a story about two young men who ultimately save themselves and each other. It saved me too.