The spartan world of Martin Koolhoven’s sober, well-made World War II melodrama, “Winter in Wartime,” is a rustic blue-gray landscape of woods and snow-covered roads through which armed German soldiers roam in trucks. This handsome film, set in a village in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands and shot in Lithuania, is an adaptation of a semiautobiographical 1972 novel by the Dutch author Jan Terlouw, who lived under German occupation for five years.

This coming-of-age story, set in 1945, contemplates the fog of war and the mysteries of adult life through the eyes of Michiel (Martijn Lakemeier), the 13-year-old son of the town’s stoic mayor, Johan van Beusekom (Raymond Thiry). The screenplay, by Koolhoven, Paul Jan Nelissen, and Mieke de Jong, evokes the acute yearning for adult experience and validation of a boy on the threshold of adolescence. Michiel has arrived at that impatient moment when he is considered too young to be privy to adult secrets but hates being treated like a child, and he is itching to prove himself a man.

Telling a story from such a naive perspective cuts two ways. The plot isn’t as clearly outlined as you might wish, and character development is necessarily limited to a child’s-eye view. At the same time the movie immerses you in the consciousness of a restless boy desperate for initiation into the rest of his life.

Michiel views his father’s uneasy cooperation with the Nazi authorities with disdain, even though it is essential to maintaining the fragile peace in the area. In other ways the father-son bond is solid; in a touching scene Johan takes pains to show the still-beardless Michiel how to shave with a straight razor.

The boy also looks up to his dashing Uncle Ben (Yorick van Wageningen), a hearty resistance fighter who arrives for a visit carrying a suitcase filled with ration cards, canned sardines and a radio. Ben, who appears to have better connections with the local German authorities than Johan, isn’t exactly what he seems, and “Winter in Wartime” is partly a story of a fallen idol.

Michiel seizes his opportunity to enter the adult sphere after observing from his bedroom window a British plane going down in flames. He visits the crash site with his best friend, Theo (Jesse van Driel), whose older brother Dirk (Mees Peijnenburg) works for the Dutch resistance. Dirk draws Michiel into the movement when he asks him to deliver a secret letter to a blacksmith should he fail to return from his latest mission.

The letter, which Michiel reads after the blacksmith is shot in the street while fleeing German soldiers, leads the boy to an underground shelter in the woods where the downed British pilot, Jack (Jamie Campbell Bower), a young man only a few years older than Michiel, is hiding.

Informing only his older sister, a nurse named Erica (Melody Klaver), about his activities, Michiel takes food to Jack, finds him medical care and helps plot his escape by ferry to a town across the river. The adventure is a fantasy come true in which Michiel is the heroic protagonist of his own drama. When he takes Erica to the hideout to dress Jack’s wound, the romantic attraction between patient and nurse is instantaneous.

Once the plan for Jack’s escape is hatched, “Winter in Wartime” turns into a moderately gripping thriller with predictable plot twists and reversals. There is a suspenseful sequence in which the horse-drawn carriage delivering Jack to the ferry loses a wheel, and German soldiers help reattach it without realizing the passenger’s identity. The movie unnecessarily uses cliched cinematic tricks, like slow-motion in an execution scene, and has some other mawkish moments.

“Winter in Wartime” goes out of its way to avoid presenting the occupying forces as Nazi caricatures, and when Michiel falls into some icy water and is rescued by a German soldier, its morally evenhanded perspective is none too subtle. Not that its Nazis are likable; they are an ominous lot, but at least they are human.

“Winter in Wartime”

No star rating provided.

103 minutes

R, for sexual content, language and some violence