— I’ve always had this knowledge deep inside of me that I could make any man fall in love with me if I really tried. And I think maybe it’s ruined my life.
Part of the pleasure in this elliptical yet accessible film is attempting to determine to what degree it's critiquing what it is depicting. And this is only complicated further when you include the paratextual knowledge that Annie Baker grew up in the West Massachusetts boonies herself, orbiting the same kind of low-key commune-slash-cult populated by post-hippy new-agers.
I find it curious that a number of reviews seem to get stuck on the co-dependency between Janet and Lacy: "she's too in love with her mother to let anyone else in" writes Jourdain Searles. This is undoubtedly true as far as it goes, but the reviews I have read tend to frame this exclusively the 'fault' of Lacy herself, apportioning little censure for Janet for establishing that dynamic and environment in the first place.
No doubt this film would land very differently if one was a mother, and a mother of a single daughter as well.
Even the title Janet Planet emphasizes the way Lacy’s world is crafted in Janet’s image, as her life is the only model for love, friendship, and womanhood she’s ever known.
— Jourdain Searles (RogerEbert.com)
Lacy wants to leave the safety of her carefully crafted and controlled reality with her mother and make new friends, yet she’s anxious, and her mother is a protective womb. It’s a similar worldview conveyed by Carol Reed in The Fallen Idol (1948), with a child who worships an adult but ultimately must reconsider their obsession. At the same time, Janet yearns to escape and find alone time. It’s worth questioning whether her final picnic with Avi actually happens, or if she lied about it for some solitude.
— Brian Eggert (Deep Focus Review)
Janet swings from dysfunctional relationship to dysfunctional relationship, seemingly incapable of maintaining more than one meaningful connection at a time. There’s a subtle implication that her efforts to give Lacy a measure of independence [are] more about her own isolation than real concern about her daughter.
— Richard Whittaker (Austin Chronicle)
Janet Planet could be called a period piece [but] it is ambivalent about nostalgia. This is not to say the film lacks love for this time and the cadences life takes on. Rather, it operates with a kind of clarity that nostalgia often lacks, as if you could live a time that you’re nostalgic for again, see it as adult and child both, and see both adulthood and childhood as inscrutable and private.
— Meghan Racklin (LA Review of Books)
Baker makes it easy. She embeds the mother-daughter relationship in closely-felt details, the intimate knowledge of how a particular place felt at a particular time in history and life. She shot Janet Planet on location in Amherst and Northampton, and filled out the crowd scenes with local extras. The product of deep familiarity, it feels vital, alive to the concerns of the people who surrounded Baker at the same age. Like Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2024 Evil Does Not Exist, the film emerges from the place where it is set, and is alive to the concerns of the people who live there, now or in the past. [The] film simply could not exist without the place which inspired it, a symbiosis of story and setting that creates what John Berger has called a “context of experience” that directs the viewer out into the world, rather than linearly to the end of a narrative.
— Robert Rubsam (Liberties Journal)
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.