After kicking off the year leading the Sundance-winning I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, Melanie Lynskey is back with the dramedy Little Boxes. Directed by Rob Meyer (A Birder’s Guide to Everything), following a premiere last year at Tribeca, it’ll arrive in theaters next month, and now the first trailer has landed. The Cary Fukunaga-executive-produced feature follows a family moving from New York City to the other side of the country and having trouble fitting into the Caucasian-filled community.
We said in our review, “With its picket-fence sameness and routine tedium making it a hot bed for deep-rooted repression — at least as depicted in many a film — the horrors of suburbia have been captured in virtually every genre. Little Boxes, directed by Rob Meyer and written by Annie J. Howell, employs this setting to explore societal racism with a grounded, realistic approach, making it all the more alarming. However, while this specific exploration proves to be effective, the drama around which it’s built becomes increasingly unimaginative.”
Also starring Nelsan Ellis, Armani Jackson, Oona Laurence, and Janeane Garofalo, check out the trailer below.
It’s the summer before 6th grade, and Clark (Jackson) is the new biracial kid in a very white town. Discovering that to be cool he needs to act ‘more black’, he fumbles to meet expectations. Meanwhile, his urban intellectual parents Mack (Ellis) and Gina (Lynskey) try to adjust to small-town living. Accustomed to life in New York, the tight-knit family is ill-prepared for the drastically different set of obstacles that their new community presents. They soon find themselves struggling to understand themselves and each other in this new context.
Little Boxes opens on April 14.