Slumberland (2022)

Slumberland takes a comic strip from 1905 and hands the lead to a girl, a swap executed with no fanfare whatsoever. Nemo mourns her father, finds a map, and drives every decision in the film, a quiet sort of agency that the production treats as sufficient. Around her, the supporting cast is diverse in the unremarked way of a Toronto shoot: Jamal at school, Ho-Sook, Agent Green of the Bureau of Subconscious Activities. Nobody delivers a speech about it. The film casts people and moves on, which is the most dignified approach available.

The emotional machinery here is grief and repression. Flip turns out to be the discarded half of Uncle Philip, a doorknob salesman who stopped dreaming somewhere along the way, and the film treats that split as a knot to untie instead of a diagnosis to announce. Mental health handled with a light hand, and it earns its modest credit. The Bureau functions as a bureaucratic antagonist, agents in colored suits guarding the subconscious, but the film never suggests that markets, landlords, or shareholders are the problem. The villain is paperwork. That is as close as this movie comes to a political thought, and it is a short walk.

This is, at bottom, a family adventure with a sentimental streak and no interest in sermonizing. It resolves with a hug, a rescue boat, and a repaired uncle, and it declines to lecture us about anything on the way there. The dreams are loud, the metaphors are gentle, and the cultural ambitions are approximately those of a well-funded bedtime story. As vintages go, this is a mild one: pleasant, forgettable, and unlikely to unsettle anyone at a dinner party.