Watching director Miranda July’s Kajillionaire is like inhabiting someone else’s nightmare. Beneath the quirky disorientation lie depths of dread and the hurt that comes from never fitting in, and knowing it.

The movie opens with a classic, uneasy scenario right out of a nightmare: sneaking into a strange place unseen and having to awkwardly sneak something out. A young woman with an angry stare is forced by her mother and father to steal packages from a post office, and she gingerly maneuvers one off the shelf with maximum stealth. The sense of the surreal mounts as this family of small-time con artists contort themselves into painful positions under a fence on the way home to avoid their angry landlord and enter their living quarters, where toxic-looking pink-and-white foam leaks through the walls. 

In only a few minutes, July has placed her characters—and actors—in a maximum discomfort zone. Earthy, witty Debra Winger as the mother transforms into a limping, bitter crone. Richard Jenkins, known for warm, intuitive performances, becomes a shifty cluck of a dad, a know-it-all whose schemes are too clever by half. And sensitive Evan Rachel Wood, as their daughter Old Dolio, appears frozen in rage and incomprehension at her dead-end predicament. Not only are all the characters sealed off in their own bizarre emotional Twilight Zones but July has outfitted them in rumpled, ill-fitting clothes that mark them as losers on the dusty suburban streets. Her characters arouse pity as well as relief that we have escaped their fate: they are nightmare versions of ourselves.

Old Dolio shows signs of wanting to escape the grim loop of her parents’ low-ball schemes, and she concocts an elaborate con involving luggage and insurance money that will take the family on a plane to New York City. Airborne, their conspicuous weirdness attracts a chipper, attractive young woman who attaches herself to the trio. But cutie-pie Melanie (Gina Rodriguez) is not the goody-two-shoes, ordinary citizen she appears to be. These cuckoos in the nest have met their own cuckoo, and their lives are about to get even weirder. Melanie is eager to turn the family onto surprisingly lucrative scams, but can her pancakes and cuddles lure Old Dolio out of angry isolation? 

All sorts of screwball shenanigans take place as the plot unfolds, some quite funny in a familiar indie-film way, but the movie remains inescapably shaded by the subconscious. Birth, motherhood, and rejection by the mother are recurring themes, with a hot tub shared by the whole crew (and the hot tub salesman) standing in as the womb. Death flits by in wraith-like form. A sex scene repels with exceedingly strange dialogue that also sounds eerily familiar. And cosmic events join with the mundane to transform reality.

Spoiler: Kajillionaire has about the happiest, redemptive ending anyone could expect. But along the way, it has opened up an abyss into loneliness and exclusion that looks right back into you. Dreams may be only dreams, but they have the power to touch and disturb something deep. Kajillionaire does exactly that.