This uncannily funny, visually rich, emotionally surprising trip tothe center of a young girl’s darkly magical inner existence—as she begins to escape her mother’s magnetic orbit in the late days of summer—heralds the arrival of a new filmmaking voice: the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker. Baker calls her debut feature film, Janet Planet, a story “about falling out of love with your mother.” And in that sense the film goes where stories about the daughters of single mothers haven’t gone before. This is not the story of a daughter going to war with her mother. Nor of a daughter and mother reconciling a peace over their differences. It’s a singular tale of breaking your mother’s beautiful, inexplicable, haunting spell over you.

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In rural Western Massachusetts, 11-year-old Lacy spends the summer of 1991 at home, enthralled by her own imagination and the attention of her mother, Janet. As the months pass, three visitors enter their orbit, all captivated by Janet and her spellbinding nature. In her solitary moments, Lacy inhabits an inner world so extraordinarily detailed that it begins to seep into the outside world. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker captures a child's experience of time passing, and the ineffability of a daughter falling out of love with her mother, in this singularly sublime film debut.

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"Baker has made an honest, endearing and occasionally “owie” portrait of how an 11-year-old girl’s clingy relationship to her single mom evolves over the course of the summer between fifth and sixth grades. Watching it feels eerily akin to running one’s fingers along a scar sustained in childhood and being magically projected back to the moment that injury was sustained." - Peter Debruge, Variety