When I was young, I had a Little Red Riding Hood doll. She had a red felt dress that, when pulled up over her head, revealed not her legs but rather the grandmother from the children’s story. And if you pulled back her white lace bonnet, you would find not the back of her head, but the face of the grinning, villainous wolf. 

Fascinated as I was with this doll, I’d forgotten about its existence until it appeared before me on the screen in Janet Planet. As I watched another little red-haired girl discover the mysteries hidden within the ingenious little doll, I was hit with a visceral memory that sent me hurtling back to my own childhood and the thorny, complicated emotions that came with it.

You might not have owned this specific doll, but Janet Planet will have other clever ways of conjuring up the same hyper-specific, almost painful flashes of your own childhood – especially for the millennials among us. Maybe it will be the scene where she creates modern art on the shower wall with her hair or the moment she pores over a worn-out The Baby-Sitters Club paperback. In fact, it’s hard to think of another film that is quite so adept at capturing that precise moment of pre-teen girlhood when our emotions start to become just a little too complicated for us to understand – that moment when we start to look at parents and wonder: Who are you?

Janet Planet, the debut feature of acclaimed playwright Annie Baker, sets the scene in 90s Massachusetts, where charismatic acupuncturist Janet lives a care-free, hippy-dippy life in the woods with her 11-year-old daughter, Lacy. Lacy is a loner – a serious, staring, spectacled little thing, who would rather hang out with (or in the vicinity of) her mother than bother making friends. The film opens with Lacy making a dramatic phone call to Janet from camp. “I’m going to kill myself,” she says matter-of-factly, “if you don’t come pick me up.”

Lacy is in love with her mother in the way only young girls can be. She can’t fall asleep unless her mother is lying in bed with her. “Can I have a piece of you?” she asks her mother one night, when Janet tells Lacy she has to sleep alone. Janet gives her a piece of her hair, which Lacy holds like a piece of treasure.

But Lacy is growing up and her mother can’t be her whole world anymore. Her mother, she is beginning to realise, has her own complicated life. Janet cycles through relationships. First comes Wayne, an embodiment of toxic masculinity itself. Then there is Regina, an actor and floater who drifts in and out of their lives. Finally, there is Avi, a pretentious leader of the local hippy farm that verges on the edge of cult-dom.

We see each relationship blossom and fade through Lacy’s eyes. We see intimate close-ups of Janet’s face as Lacy watches her with each of her partners. We see distant, muted arguments as Lacy watches her mother doing adult things from her bedroom window or from the top of the staircase. We see these people come and go without much explanation.

Baker’s first film is astoundingly assured. She has no problem moving at a slow, even glacial pace. At one point, we simply watch a frozen meal get heated up in the microwave for what feels like a full minute. Julianne Nicholson (Janet) and Zoe Ziegler (Lacy) are both mesmerising; in a film that unfolds in the silences, their faces speak volumes.

Janet Planet is ultimately a doomed love story about the painful realisation that our parents are not wholly our own – that there are entire worlds within them that we can’t quite grasp. To Lacy, Janet really is as big and unknowable as a planet. In the final scene, Lacy and her mother attend a line dance. Janet swings dizzily from one partner to another then another and another, until she spins out of sight and out of Lacy’s orbit altogether. Lacy watches on, her heart breaking. As Janet says earlier in the film: “What are we even talking about when we talk about mothers?” 

Images: A24