ars and the Real Girl begins with a fixed shot of the titular Lars (Ryan Gosling) staring at a barren landscape from behind a window, behind a Linus-evoking blanket, and behind a moustache, ensconced in layers of clothing, looking sallow, pale, and sleep-deprived. In the sweetly strange, oft-humorous tale that follows, those layers incrementally fall aside, both figuratively and metaphorically. And there’s a love story involving an anatomically correct mail-order doll.

A psychoanalyst’s dream, small-town, Christmas-sweater-clad man-boy, Lars, has a bevy of ticks and peculiarities, including abandonment issues, a painful aversion to touch (hence the heavy knits), extreme introversion, and delusions of man-on-living-doll love (like Geppetto, but romantic instead of paternal). Most prevalently, he struggles with guilt and confusion over his long-dead mother. Fittingly, maternal figures abound, from a tellingly pregnant sister-in-law and a widowed doctor to his new girlfriend, Bianca (the ironically eponymous “Real Girl”).

Lars is surrounded by would-be pimps/caring neighbours that indulge his slight dementia, tacitly accepting it if not fully buying into it. It’s not a standard boy meets doll fable, nor is it a tale of townie quirkiness. Despite site gags (i.e. Bianca sitting at a dinner table; Bianca in a bathtub, etc.) the narrative stays ardently clear of the fantastical.

Throughout, stillness pervades. Seldom does the camera move about and landscape shots never sweep nor glide idealistically. The lack of movement frames and amplifies Lars’s gradual evolution. Similarly, the staunch realism that orbits the central plot both spotlights the narrative’s peculiarity and enhances its resonance. The town isn’t populated by eccentrics and the general normalcy of tertiary characters eases the acceptance of a relatively absurd premise.