It’s difficult to overstate just how millennial Unicorn Store , award-winning actress Brie Larson’s charming directorial debut, really is. Released on Netflix last month, the whimsical indie dramedy (written by Samantha McIntyre) follows a young art student Kit’s (Larson) fortunes after she fails art school, goes back to her student counsellor parents Gladys and Gene (Joan Cusack and Bradley Whitford), and takes a temp job at a PR firm where her boss Gary (Hamish Linklater) is a sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen. And just as Kit’s patience with her new workplace and her well-meaning but cloying parents is about to run out, she receives an invitation from what appears to be a literal unicorn store, run by The Salesman (Samuel L Jackson), a larger-than-life figure in pink suits and with tinsel in his hair. The only catch? Kit has to perform some tasks that show she’s ‘worthy’ of a unicorn’s undying love.

For much of the film, Larson balances the two tones expertly — the cynical-but-heartwarming indie comedy, and the dead serious growing-up drama where we, along with everybody in Kit’s life, wonder whether she’s delusional and needs chemical intervention.

“The most adult thing you can do is failing in what you really care about,” says Gladys to alleviate her daughter’s existential ennui. The line might as well have been the film’s leitmotif, for almost every character in it is a ‘failure’ by conventional Hollywood standards. Kit fails her art school exam. Gladys and Gene counsel students, taking them on camping trips where the kids lie through their teeth, making up stories when it’s ‘share time’. Even The Salesman, desperate to sell a unicorn, flies off the handle when Kit shows signs of wavering from her resolve. These are people who may well have been comfortable in their skins had it not been for the Manichean belief system the corporate world has been peddling since the dawn of capitalism — the idea that people are either ‘productive’ or not, and that this is the most noteworthy fact about their lives.

Kit’s office — and, by extension, soulless corporate America — is a religious presence in the film. In fact, for a debut that’s equal parts suburban indie comedy and workplace satire, it’s remarkable how clear the film is with its religious messaging. In the first five minutes itself, we see Kit bombarded with TV advertisements that advise her to get a temp job — the tone and tenor of the ad could have been that of a televangelist, using the ‘productivity discourse’ to its advantage. The name of the temp job agency is, well, Temporary Success. “Are you tired of feeling like a failure? Success is all around you!... What are you waiting for? Achieve your temporary success today. After all, you don’t want to be a great disappointment, do you?” The next morning, Kit puts on her mother’s suit (every religion has a signature attire), and announces to her delighted parents that she’s taking up a temp job, borrowing lines wholesale from the ad (parents love it when you quote scripture) for good measure.

The unicorn store itself is, of course, a thinly-veiled hipster place of worship — it’s an abandoned church that’s been redecorated with unicorn-themed things. The Salesman is every flamboyant TV preacher you’ve ever seen, hamming it up, raising the emotional stakes for a live audience until the hallelujahs really are spontaneous. It is the tasks that he sets for Kit, however, that really bring out the connection between the corporate world, organised religion, and the hapless, boxed-into-a-corner millennial. Kit has to build a small house worthy of a unicorn — a task that underlines financial responsibility. And she has to sort out her family life, to ensure that there are no negative vibes in the family the unicorn will come into.

Ever applied for a loan that you really needed, only to be told that you’ll get the loan if you can prove you don’t really need it? Are you a young parent with an adopted child? Were you deemed worthy of receiving love once you proved you had a surplus of it at home already? If so, you’ll recognise the sinister nature of The Salesman’s tasks instantly.

Unicorn Store critiques these upside-down ‘procedures’, yet another legacy of the corporate world’s dominance over our lives. In Kit’s emphatic rejection of her parents’ saccharine self-help philosophy, there is more than a bit of the millennial’s righteous rage. You left us a crippled economy, a bad job market and an even worse real estate market, she seems to be saying. We’re homeless, penniless, reckless even — but, goddammit, we won’t let you take our unicorns away, too.

There was never a doubt about Larson’s acting skills — at 29, the former child star is an Academy Award winner and one of the highest-paid actresses in the world today. As Captain Marvel, she is set to rule the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the next decade or so (Larson recently signed a seven-film deal with them). With Unicorn Store , she makes a triumphant debut as director.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based freelance writer

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