Janet Planet review: A theatrical, haunted portrait of an anguished mother and the daughter who adores her

“Can I have a piece of you?” Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) asks her beautiful and generous mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson). Their relationship, the centre of playwright Annie Baker’s feature debut, Janet Planet, is precious but infected. The film spends its runtime trying to find the roots of this malaise. Wayne (Will Patton), Janet’s current boyfriend, thinks it’s odd that an 11-year-old still curls up in bed with her mother each night, like a pup in a foxhole. So, Janet plucks out a strand of hair and hands it to her daughter to remember her by, now that she has to be confined in her own bedroom.

Baker’s film, which she also wrote, starts with Lacy using a payphone and threatening to kill herself if she’s not immediately picked up and driven home from camp. She recants after her first step beyond its gates. Another kid gave her a troll doll to say goodbye. “I thought nobody would like me. But I was wrong,” she confesses. It’s seemingly hard for Lacy to imagine an existence outside her mother’s sphere. It’s 1991, and Janet is a New Age-type acupuncturist, who’s brought her and her daughter to a serene but isolated cabin out in the wilds of Massachusetts. Her life force overwhelms.

Every adult who waltzes in and out of this woman’s life – three here, who create Janet Planet’s three-act, chaptered structure – imprints themselves on Lacy. Wayne is the dull, bad boyfriend, who brings a sour air into the home. Then comes Regina (Sophie Okonedo), an old friend of Janet’s, who knows her history and exposes her delusions. She’s arrived as an escapee from a theatre troupe, which might actually be a minor-key cult and whose leader, Avri (Elias Koteas), comes knocking in the film’s final chapter.

Baker’s frames are carefully posed, sometimes concerned with mirrors or fractured bodies in a way that evokes the wild, haunted self-portraits of photographer Francesca Woodman. It looks precise and slightly unnatural; tied to lines of dialogue that, too, sound precise, and slightly unnatural. Baker won a Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for The Flick, a play about cinema ushers. Here, she brings a theatrical state of mind to film – we understand every word and action here to have symbolic value, and Janet Planet is not afraid of its own artificiality. It’s sparse in narrative, but thick with implications.

That said, there’s nothing particularly exaggerated about Nicholson’s performance. She carries generations of muted anguish in her eyes – brilliant blue but strained. Nicholson has always been an actor who radiates fierce intelligence and self-possession, making it all the more tragic when one of her characters – Janet, say, or her dysfunctional daughter in August: Osage County, or when she played Marilyn Monroe’s troubled mother in Blonde – starts to lose control of themselves. You can sense how aware they are of their own disasters. Ziegler, meanwhile, is instantly loveable, looking out from a pair of gigantic wire frames with a nervous but inquisitive quality, like the cutest little turtle venturing out of its shell.

Lacy, at her piano teacher’s house, picks up a Red Riding Hood doll. She flips the skirt inside out. It transforms into the grandmother. She pulls back the bonnet and, boom, now it’s the wolf. Janet smirks when Lacy tells her that “every moment of my life is hell”. It sounds comically implausible. Yet, turn things upside down, inside out, and suddenly, you’ll find a child at risk of being prematurely drowned in adult melancholy. The emotions in Janet Planet creep up on you.

Dir: Annie Baker. Starring: Julianne Nicholson, Zoe Ziegler, Elias Koteas, Will Patton, Sophie Okonedo. 12A, 113 mins.

‘Janet Planet’ is in cinemas from 19 July