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Film review: Petite Maman (2021)

This is a magical little film, in more ways than one.  It feels like a perfect little short story, all mood and atmosphere.  It could have been a BBC play-for-today from the seventies (complete with zero budget), in that (a) it has zero budget, and (b) it has that magical "remembered from childhood" feel to it.  I advise you to watch it without knowing anything (so you should stop reading now), and just to open yourself up it its unhurried pace, and it will creep under your skin before you know it.  Here's the plot in a nutshell: it opens in an old-folks' home, as a young girl goes from room to room saying goodbye to a series of (slightly bemused) old ladies, until she arrives in a room that's just been emptied because its inhabitant, the girl's grandmother, has just died.  There's a man and a woman there, who hug, and then the man drives off in one car and the woman, clearly the girl's mother, loads the girl into her car and they drive off.  There are touching scenes of the girl feeding snacks to her mother on the drive, and then we arrive at what was clearly the grandmother's house (and the house the mother grew up in) where the man is waiting.  I was a little confused as to whether the man was an uncle or the girl's father, because he remembered the house, too, but it emerges fairly quickly that he's her father, and he just knew it because he and the mother knew each other from when they were children.  It's pretty vague as to whether or not they're still together, but in any case, the mother, after spending the night at the house (and telling her daughter about how she used to be scared of the dark, imagining a panther at the foot of her bed, predictably leading to the girl joining her on the sofa (another suggestion that the couple is estranged)), the mother is gone, leaving the father and the girl to pack up the rest of the grandmother's things.  They don't really throw themselves into it, and the girl explores the woods behind the house.  There she meets another girl.  A girl who is the same age as her and looks strikingly similar (they're played by sisters, fraternal or sororal twins, I would guess).  A girl who does the things (building a fort) her mother described doing in those woods as a child, and who takes our heroine back to her house... which is the grandmother's house 23 years ago...

You probably get the basic idea.  But it's beautifully realized and about as un-Hollywood as you could wish for.  See it, it will haunt your dreams.  In a good way.