In The Florida Project’s final scene, Moonee and Jancey flee the motel from Child Protective Services. The viewer might well think some horrible fate awaits them — a car accident as they cross the thoroughfare, for instance — and the viewer is correct, though not in the way one expects. The girls end up in the real “Magic Kingdom” of Disney World, a scene Baker shot guerilla-style on iPhone. We leave the film’s diegetic world for a non-diegetic one. A soundtrack plays behind the girls for the first time as they run past happy families taking pictures with Disney’s signature castle. These are the same happy families from which some of Halley’s male clients seek freedom. In Baker’s world, the Magic Castle Motel and Disney’s Magic Kingdom make for two sides of dishonest, ugly American aesthetics: one environment is “prettier” than the other [though] both are equally mendacious. It is the film’s final cruelty that Moonee escapes her local ugliness into another false production.
— Geoff Nelson (Los Angeles Review of Books)
Synopsis: The story of a precocious six year-old and her ragtag group of friends whose summer break is filled with childhood wonder, possibility and a sense of adventure while the adults around them struggle with hard times.