Stilted & Awkward High School Fantasy Is A Confounding Mess

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Peas and Carrots starts as a rote high school coming-of-age story, but soon devolves into something much more bizarre. It’s sort of like if there was a Kidz Bop version of a lost David Lynch movie: a socially awkward kid of former rock musicians gets sucked into an alternate reality, which is the set of a Disney-esque sitcom where all the actors only speak the titular nonsensical phrase.

There’s something interesting here in Evan Oppenheimer’s opaque approach, and there are moments where the neon purple hues suggest an identity-searching vehicle like I Saw the TV Glow. But only briefly, as this 90-minute slog is boondoggled by stilted acting, odd pacing, and an utterly confounding dual-plot narrative that only intersects if you squint hard enough.

It isn’t just the plotting that’s off-kilter here. Kirrilee Berger plays Joey with a decent enough grounded feeling, but the actress is absolutely not readable as a 16-year-old (nor, for that matter, does Talia Oppenheimer come even close to her supposed age of 13). The strange casting from top to bottom gives this already kooky film the feeling of adults cosplaying as children, but not in any self-aware manner.

While her father, Gordon (Jordan Bridges), has given up music to teach, her mother Laurie (Amy Carlson) cannot figure out how to factor art into her fractured life, subjecting herself to YouTube music channel interviews that skewer her for her age. The two were once part of a band called City Kids that had a self-titled hit in 1996, but have seemingly made nothing of substance since then. Whatever her age, Joey loves music and hates to see her parents wallow in self-pity, so she suggests they all start a Partridge Family-style band.

Meanwhile, at night, Joey turns on a faulty night light, which seems to project a lavender glow into the doorway, and when she passes through it, she finds herself on the world’s most boring set. Time seems to pass differently in both dimensions, and Joey is confused wherever she is. Berger is a rather vanilla on-screen presence, which doesn’t help when the bulk of her job is to sell someone who is perpetually lost.

“Peas and carrots” may just be a performative phrase, but it is an unfortunately good reflection of a film that is total nonsense from start to finish.

On set, everyone is catty and rude to her. It’s impossible to say what she’s there to shoot, but she starts off as an extra before inexplicably being given more and more lines until she is more or less the lead. And when she comes back to reality, she has no memory of how long she’s been away.

The title of the film refers to the practice of background actors muttering the titular phrase to give the visual impression of actual dialogue (in the UK, the word is “rhubarb.”) To give the film some general credit, it seems like Oppenheimer is putting Joey through the ringer of proper communication, by which she must decide what kind of person she wants to be: a star or a background actor. Oppenheimer makes some gestures towards the importance of a group effort, but the film also suggests that it is better to fade into the background than to take the spotlight, which is kind of the opposite of what a good coming-of-age film should do.

The truth is that the connection between these two worlds is tenuous at best, and there is not nearly enough facility between any wing of the production to make whatever intention clear at all. The most alluring of the potential plot lines here is that of Laurie and Gordon, as they figure out how to incorporate art into a life of obligatory domesticity. But it’s given short shrift, and the film settles into a very strange and silly wormhole whereby it tries to figure out if this whole alternative universe thing is actually real or just a dream.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Peas and Carrots is amateur on almost every front, and whatever it has to say about finding one’s proper role in society is hidden inside some utterly confounding plot devices. “Peas and carrots” may just be a performative phrase, but it is an unfortunately good reflection of a film that is total nonsense from start to finish.