Courtesy of TIFF
MOVIE REVIEW
This Place (2022)
“This Place” is a sweet but slight movie that does itself no favors with the generic title. Its explorations of what it means to be Canadian – more accurately, a person who happens to be growing up in Canada who is neither white nor straight – hold a great deal of interest. That’s hampered by the fact that director V. T. Nayani, who cowrote the script with fast-rising star Devery Jacobs and Golshan Abdmoulaie (who also has a small part), has a sophomoric outlook. That’s not to say “This Place” is puerile, far from it. It’s only exactly what you would expect – a little narcissistic, a little exhausting – about 21-year-olds with complicated daddy issues. Of course there’s a lot of innate sympathy for any coming-of-age story. But how charming you find it usually depends on how much about life you’ve worked out for yourself.