Moonee was joyful, but the movie was depressing AF. It was like watching a slow-motion car-crash, the feeling of dread just kept building and building. I was almost relieved she didn't end up dead.

I took the ending as a surreal escapist fantasy, Moonee basically dreaming about what she wanted rather than what was actually happening to her. There is no way they would have been able to run all the way to disney from the motel, much less get in without a pass.

Agree with the OP. This is a two hour torment of child neglect. That the kid(s) are (ftm) oblivious to this neglect is neither here nor there, and certainly not 'joyful'. As for the descriptions of the adults 'struggling through hard times', gimme a break. The mother has 1000s of dollars in tats, an iphone, yet still refuses to do an honest day's work and instead chooses to steal, scam and sponge off charities.

Absolutely depressing, and doubly so that some reviewers are so screwed up they confuse this sort of lazy criminality and child neglect with what it means to actually struggle against adversity.

I enjoyed the cinematography with this film, and the acting is first rate by all concerned but in terms of narrative this feels like improv and that no one, including the writer, actually had a clue about what the story really was. I for one am certainly none the wiser about what it means to be a single mum in Orlando in the early 21st Century. Seems to me that no one else in this movie had a clue either. And having a clue is something of a prerequisite to telling a story.

This article should clear a few things up:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/florida-project-ending-director-sean-baker-explains-meaning-how-he-did-it-1047215

I appreciated the link but tbh, the directors comments only leave me more confused. He makes a claim that it’s entertainment (like The Little Rascals) but then also talks about the housing crisis for many families. It seems to me you can’t have that both ways. You either see these experiences through the eyes of a child (joyfully, naively, optimistically) or through the eyes of an adult, which is not so much of that. Asking the audience to do both is jarring, and disorienting. The director claims too much. That said, it was a painfully accurate film. If there was joy, it was the dark and painful kind.

Yes, the director's remarks are very strange. If you want to raise the housing issue and the impact on kids then do your slice of life around one of the other (normal) single mothers in the film, their kids and the impact of grinding poverty. You could have housed the main character and their kid in a palace and she clearly would have still been an atrocious mother, incapable of looking after a child. The kid would still have been messed up.

By all means show the sociopath woman as some background colour, but don't centre it on her and expect to generate reasoned discussion of social issues. The only social issue this raises is whether we leave kids too long with abject failures of parents, before the state steps in to try and minimise the damage (in this instance a young girl walking around derelict buildings, running across road, not seemingly going to school and having been hospitalised due to presumably having been left unsupervised in unsanitary conditions).

It just felt a bit like clickbait extended to 1hr 50mins with the invitation to look down our nose at a criminal underclass. Points only for attempted realism and not glossing it up one bit.

5/10