Janet Planet is interesting on all sorts of levels but the title is a good place to start. Because the film is really concerned with Lacy, a girl of about 11 who is withdrawn and self-absorbed, friendless and a bit weird but sweet, smart and nice with it. Why she has no friends seems like a mystery and by the end of the film it remains largely unanswered, but writer/director Annie Baker gives us clues – the big one being Janet, the planetary object around which Lacy orbits, her mother.
This is Baker’s first film, and the debut also of Zoe Ziegler, who plays Lacy, but most of the rest of the cast are well known – Julianne Nicholson plays Janet, Will Patton is the guy she’s seeing early on but has soon dumped, at Lacy’s instigation, Sophie Okonedo is the old friend she briefly reconnects with, and Elias Koteas is some sort of local guru, the leader of a commune in backwoods Massachusetts who’s charismatic and probably as bogus as they come. Again, Baker hints but never really tells us and the opaque performances by all concerned lend the whole thing a “through a glass darkly” ambience.
In a film built almost as an exercise in “show but don’t quite tell” Baker details the home life of this inward-focused pair in snapshots – the mother’s terrible choice of men, the daughter’s anxieties, the bizarre behaviour first of Wayne (Patton) and later Avi (Koteas), the men who swim briefly into focus only to swim away again. At one point Janet tells Lacy how she believes she can make any man in the world fall in love with her. While she’s undeniably attractive this is probably self delusion on a grand scale. Again, it’s hard to say.
Baker’s portrait of the mother-daughter relationship is partial but pungent. “Every moment of my life is hell,” says Lacy at one point, and we’re not sure if she’s just being theatrical. She seems happy enough at piano lessons with a kindly teacher, or absorbed in the little clay figures she makes. At another a tear-stained Janet drinks white wine during the daytime. She’s just dumped Wayne. No more is said.
Baker’s portrait of the locale is just as fragmentary, but it seems oppressive, this mix of hayseed and hippie, pagan almost. Like the funny festival/ceremony Janet and Lacy attend in a clearing in the woods, where big animal figures jig about while long-haired types bang drums and chant. Avi makes a speech. Refers to what they’ve witnessed as a “service”.
He’s in charge at the commune, and being in charge is something that Janet doesn’t seem to have a handle on. This has been transmitted to her daughter, who looks like she is in the process of setting off into her life in the same aimless way her mother has lived hers.
I’d like to say that that’s what Janet Planet is “about” – not quite getting a grip. Or it’s an examination of the negative space of a psyche that isn’t working properly, and is replicating a version of itself. If that sounds strange, then this is a strange film, depressing if you’re not in the mood, revelatory if you are.
There is no music. Baker shoots in long takes with Janet and Lacy often falling out of the frame or not quite properly in it and her DP, Maria von Hausswolff, gives her strong, rich images with a matt finish – nothing really sparkles in this film.
All in all it’s a downbeat take on a deadbeat existence, though Janet is ostensibly OK – nice house, little acupuncture business with customers (who we never see) bringing in the money. But the way people come and go – first Wayne, then Regina (Okonedo), then Avi – are like comets flashing by, with Janet and Lacy two astronauts lost in space. Something is very wrong here.
Janet Planet – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
