Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

Linoleum is my kind of mystery. What’s going on with Cameron (Jim Gaffigan)? He’s just checking his mail, minding his own business, and suddenly a red sports car falls out of the sky onto the street next to him. He walks around, and the person inside the smashed car looks uncannily like a younger version of him.

Cameron is also the host of a struggling children’s show, focused on science. It’s very low-fi, which gives it an undeniable charm, and we are subject to a great many fun clips from it—including the opening scene. We shift from there to the falling car in short order, with pleasant cinematography and clever editing, and we immediately wonder if this film is going to be playing with time or space or both, or perhaps the supernatural.

I won’t spoil it. Linoleum is best experienced, I suspect, the way I experienced it: knowing almost nothing about the content or the tone. I’ll tell you this: Gaffigan is competent in not one, but two parts; Rhea Seehorn is lovely as his frustrated wife; Katelyn Nacon charms as his daughter, Nora; Gabriel Rush is a bit stoic as Nora’s love interest. Roger Hendricks Simon plays the elder man we are clearly meant to assume is Cameron’s father, ailing with dementia. Curiously, when asked “Who are you?” Cameron doesn’t say, “I’m your son,” but rather, “You know me.” If you clock that, you’ll know something odd is afoot.

And you wouldn’t be wrong. By the end of Linoleum, how all these characters are connected is revealed to be something different from how it initially appeared—both confused and clicking pieces together, making everything make sense. I was somewhat relieved by this ending, actually, as I can’t imagine everything seen prior to be as satisfying in any other way.

Linoleum is a special kind of movie that has a peculiar charm threaded through its melancholy. It’s sort of an exercise in blending nostalgia and wistfulness, a longing for great times that can no longer be. Writer-director Colin West offers a slightly abstract portrait of complicated love and longing, revealing how simple seemingly complex things can be, and vice versa. “It’s not that simple” is a line uttered several times, always clear that it really is.

There is a running theme of unrealized dreams in this movie, with Cameron mentioning how he always wanted to do “something fantastic.” This film itself is something fantastic, in the literal sense of the word. It doesn’t seem to be getting much traction in theaters, and I can only hope it will soon on one streamer or another. I found it quite lovely, and surprisingly moving.

*It will take you to unexpected places you’ll be glad you went.*

Overall: B+