If anything, titles are spiffed up, catchily punning or titillating or Roman-numeraled to hook a public that really ought to know better by now. Perhaps after Hitchcock, horror films in particular go for the jugular in staccato single-word names, and it is a shame that recently Rotterdam-based but Kazakhstan-born director/co-writer Guka Omarova’s first feature may be ignored by adults wary of the unpromising title Schizo.

Yes, from “schizophrenia,” after fourteen-year-old Mustafa (Olzhas Nussuppaev), so nicknamed for peccadilloes, not terribly anti-social behavior and school problems in rural, forbidding and farming uplands (vozvishennost’) outside Almaty (Alma-Ata), so far east in Kazakhstan that proximity to China is reflected in the mix of racial types. Horizon, washed-out sky and scrub fields are infinite backdrop to a small touching coming-of-age tale and unusual but not improbable love.

Inspired by a true café relation of a quite young ex-boxer aged into despair by life’s hard knocks, this is the story of “Schizo” (“Schiza” in subtitles, from Russian with a few Kazakh words in scenes with his uncle), who lives with unmarried mother Kulyasha (Gulnara Jeralieva) and her petty-hoodlum motorcycle boyfriend Sakura (Eduard Tabyschev). Paid for his services in local produce and humorously taking his own blood pressure and temperature, Dr. Viktor (Soukhorukov) dispenses harmless pills and prescribes an expensive city specialist for the supposedly “slow” boy.

An orphan discovered in a car-repair shop, Nussuppaev uses his face, rabbit-tooth grin and dark eyes over words in expressing the shy youngster’s introduction to the world. The opportunistic boyfriend pays him a little to solicit down-at-heels locals for illegal no-holds-barred prizefights. No one else bothers as one such recruit, Ali (Renat), lies beaten and dying on a concrete locker-room floor, but sensitive Schizo promises to deliver the man’s pocket money to his girlfriend “on the edge of town” and his jug-eared toddler son Sanzhik (Kanagat Nurtay, another orphan).

Freckled and blue-eyed, a steppes Sissy Spacek, the girlfriend Zina (stage actress Olga Landina, in her first film) has a limp, is suspicious, weary of raising Ali’s son and thinks that the father has not sent all the money; later, told that he died earning the cash, she wistfully talks of going to work as a waitress in China. Though Sanzhik knows that Schizo has carried off one of his two toy cars, he is nevertheless intrigued by the older boy, just as that older boy is fascinated -- only partly physically -- by the woman a bit older than he.

Seeking new blood for the fights, Schizo enlists his drunken, over-the-hill, petty thief Uncle Zhaken (Bakhytbek Baymukhanbeatov) from a wonderfully weird industrial stilt-house home, and Zhaken turns the bout around and wins a promised “American Mercedes” for the trouble. At a livestock fair, uncle and nephew sell the car for U.S. dollars, and the boy buys and returns to Zina with a watermelon and print dress, plus swim goggles for Sanzhik. Good-hearted and flattered, she invites him onto her mattress for his underplayed, humorous and tender sexual initiation.

Desperate after a beating and threats from fight promoter Almaz (Khorabek Musabeyev), Sakura nastily steals mother’s nest egg and further enlists the son, in the armed robbery of a factory payroll-money exchange office, during which the young man stops to buy apples. Complications arise, and a now more prescient and mature Schizo makes provisions for the two women in his life, mother and Zina, and, along with the latter, the boy Sanzhik.

To sparse voiceover scenes, a warm ending awaits and, overhead-angled down a long street, a future is promised. Simply, more tastefully than it sounds, the film and the family are rounded out. Six weeks’ filming, some auspicious débuts, and an un-noisy satisfying gem.

(Released by Nasha Kino; not rated by MPAA.)