Janet Planet

“Nothing feels more female-centric than the wary, ever-watchful undercurrent that pervades Janet Planet.”

Title: Janet Planet (2024)
Director: Annie Baker 👩🏼🇺🇸
Writer: Annie Baker 👩🏼🇺🇸

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

Technical: 3.75/5

A24’s Janet Planet marks the feature debut by Pulitzer-winning playwright Annie Baker. Similar to her previous work, Baker uses quiet and brutally honest storytelling, this time following the anxieties and growth of 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) as she clings to her sometimes exasperated—but always loving—single mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson), an acupuncturist living in rural Western Massachusetts.

Cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff (Godland, Meanwhile on Earth) elevates Baker’s understated writing with beautiful and innocent, washed out lighting. A low camera angle, or voyeuristic framing through windows and foliage, consistently puts the viewer in Lacy’s young shoes and lends the film a sense of aching intimacy.

But this isn’t the first independent film to use fly-on-the-wall sensibilities to deliver a character-driven tale shaded in pregnant pauses and negative space. Narratively, Janet Planet recalls examinations of childhood angst found in stories like Eighth Grade (2018) or documentary We Can Be Heroes (2024) about a summer camp for young LARP enthusiasts. And naturalistic soundscapes and visuals are familiar as well—recent films by Kelly Reichardt such as First Cow (2019) and Showing Up (2022) also evoke lush, sunbleached atmospheres. But each and every one of these quiet films is a gem, as is Baker’s.

Gender: 5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

Written and directed by a female filmmaker, Janet Planet centers around female leads Lacy and Janet. Its central preoccupation—of a young girl’s changing relationship with her mother—also focuses on themes unique to women and girls. As Baker states in the film’s press notes, “There’s this kind of longing you can have for your mother that’s not sexual but is about possession and touch.”

Not only does this story evince a female perspective, it expands that perspective through art direction. By viewing the quiet beauty of the natural world through the lens of a preteen girl, the film confidently employs the female gaze. Baker and von Hausswolff home in on small details—a lone earring on the ground; a mother’s hand stroking the back of her daughter’s hair; the trilling of crickets drowning out dinner conversation on the patio.

“Maria [von Hausswolff] was brilliant, and we spent an enormous amount of time together, sometimes with our three-year-olds in tow,” Baker says. “We talked a lot about different levels of watching and being watched.” In a society where women, and especially girls, are compelled to be silent—forced to read other people’s body language and to anticipate others’ needs and desires before their own—there’s nothing that feels more in tune with female and other marginalized audiences than this wary, ever-watchful undercurrent that pervades Janet Planet.

Race: 3.5/5

Among the film’s four titled chapters, Janet’s friend Regina (Sophie Okonedo) occupies one of them. Unlike Okonedo’s past turn as the unfailingly supportive friend in Wild Rose (2019), the British actor, who has Jewish and Nigerian heritage, thankfully gets her own backstory with emotional trajectory in Janet Planet. That said, she still firmly sits in a secondary position compared to white main characters. And other important figures, Janet’s boyfriends Wayne (Will Patton) and Avi (Elias Koteas), are white.

In minor roles, South Asian and East Asian people are visible in crowds, whether at malls or as musicians. But otherwise, per its 1991 setting in the rural Northeast, the cast is predominantly white.

Bonus for LGBTQ: +0.25

At one point, Lacy asks her mother if she’d “be disappointed” if she was into girls. Janet thinks about it, then responds that no, she’d be happy for her. With this as one of their many thoughtful and honest conversations, the existence of queer sexuality is naturally folded into the movie. Furthermore, given the film’s time period during the AIDS/HIV epidemic, Janet’s response feels particularly empathetic.

Bonus for Religion: +0.25

Baker is a Jewish American writer. The film doesn’t explore Jewish culture in depth, but a stray comment adds texture to the film: During one of Janet’s monologues about how she grew up, she mentions, “It was just me and my Holocaust-survivor dad and my angry mom.”

Mediaversity Grade: B+ 4.25/5

Janet Planet expertly wields creative framing, nostalgic lighting, and immersive sound design to transport viewers into Lacy’s world of adolescent alienation. For anyone who’s ever felt estranged from loved ones, or experienced that yearning from the sidelines, Baker’s debut film will hit like a gut punch.

Like Janet Planet? Try these other films that use intimate, voyeuristic camera techniques.

Grade: BLiJuly 1, 2024Female/Nonbinary Creator, Great for: Gender