A24 serves a beautiful, melancholy coming-of-age trailer with Janet Planet

It appears we’ve reached some sort of millennial inflection point wherein all the new nostalgic coming-of-age films are set in the summer of 1991. But where Snack Shack was a rowdy, boisterous midwestern romp, the trailer for A24’s Janet Planet, premiering June 21, is a quiet East Coast meditation threaded with melancholy. Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler play a mismatched mother-daughter duo whose relationship appears to be straining under the pressure of growing pains.

“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,” reads a synopsis for the film. “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.”

The relationship between Lacy and Janet is like Gilmore Girls, subverted: in that beloved show, the codependency of the mother-daughter relationship is generally celebrated, its toxicity rarely investigated. But what if the freewheeling, romantically inclined single mother grew weary of parenting her nerdy, precocious daughter? What if the precocious daughter could recognize and register her unhappiness with her mother’s capricious relationships? And what if the story examined how the insulating nature of their little family kept them at a remove from their community, rather than making them beloved by a town of wacky misfits? These are just some of the ideas represented in the film’s trailer.

Janet Planet debuted at Telluride Film Festival to warm reviews. First-time filmmaker Baker previously won a Pulitzer Prize for her play The Flick in 2014. She told Vanity Fair last year that while making the movie, she “rediscovered how mysterious movie love is—and how hard to explain.” Though Janet Planet is centered around the adults who drift in and out of Janet’s life (played by Elias Koteas, Will Patton, and Sophie Okonedo), it is focused on Lacy’s perspective. “There is a particular feeling that I associate with being 11 and the way you relate to adults and nature and context that feels very particular to me,” Baker told VF. “Being an 11-year-old girl is about looking, but also looking at yourself being looked at.”