It’s about a house—a three-story Victorian pad painted purple and surrounded by a tall vegetable garden. As we get to know its funky, arty residents over the course of one New England summer, there’s little division between inside and outside, as Ping-Pong matches assemble, joking friends cock their heads out of windows, and a bespectacled neighbor-kid, Curtis (Jonah Parker), emerges from his shy cocoon into a kindred spirit to the fun.
Writer-director Laura Colella hasn’t strayed far from home (these characters are her actual housemates, rechristened into fiction), but her project feels like a casual experiment gone wonderfully right. She’s created a lovable, wine-swilling literary gasbag in Syd (Theo Green), the manse’s epicurean publisher-owner who absorbs Curtis into a video project. Five years earlier, the boy angered him, but forgiveness thrums through the movie’s veins; it’s less Wes Anderson–quirky than Jane Campion–woolly. Try it.
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