Sean Baker's 2017 drama follows six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) and her young mother Halley (Bria Vinaite) through a summer at the Magic Castle, a purple budget motel a few miles from Walt Disney World, watched over by manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe).
It rewards viewers willing to sit with a child's-eye view of a hard adult situation rather than a plotted arc: the film moves episodically, building understanding of Halley and Moonee's circumstances scene by scene instead of through exposition.
The film sits outside the obvious streaming picks partly because of how it was cast. Baker discovered Vinaite through her Instagram account in spring 2016; she had no prior acting experience and had to Google him to confirm he was a legitimate filmmaker before flying to Orlando to audition. That casting gamble, on a film that premiered in Cannes' Directors' Fortnight to strong reviews, never became a mainstream awards-season title in the way its Cannes reception suggested it might, leaving it easy to miss on any watchlist built from bigger, more heavily marketed titles.
Its defining choice is visual: cinematographer Alexis Zabe shot the motel and its surrounding strip-mall Florida in widescreen 35mm, saturated with candy pinks, purples and lavenders that read more like a children's storybook than a film about housing precarity. Baker uses the aesthetic to stay inside Moonee's perspective, where a parking lot can look like an adventure, while the surrounding reality, of families cycling through weekly motel rates within sight of the world's most famous theme park, stays visible at the edges of the frame. Dafoe's performance as Bobby earned him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.
Prince and Vinaite, neither with prior professional training, carry the film's heaviest scenes, and Baker's way with children, letting them play and improvise rather than hit marks, is why Moonee never reads as a scripted kid. Save it for a night when a film can be episodic and unhurried; its rewards arrive sideways, in the gap between what Moonee sees and what the adult viewer understands about her summer.
