By Annie Baker. Directed by Dean Paul Gibson. At the Arts Club Granville Island Stage on Wednesday, October 5. Continues until October 29

The Flick mirrors our world back at us. It’s not always pretty or kind, but it sure feels real—which makes it both funny and heartbreaking.

Playwright Annie Baker won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2014 script, in which we watch three employees working at a movie theatre, one of the few still operating with a 35mm projector. Avery is an anxious young college student and movie buff learning the ropes from Sam, a 30-something who has given up on dreaming about a better future for himself. Sam is unrequitedly in love with the projectionist, Rose, a charismatic narcissist who flirts inappropriately with, like, everyone.

And we really do watch the characters working: a substantial chunk of the play’s three-hour running time is taken up by Sam and Avery sweeping up popcorn from between the theatre’s seats. (Props to the stagehands who have to keep messing up the set between scenes.) Baker drops little thematic crumbs along the path of these quotidian rituals, returning later to gather them into a meditation on race, class, power, and authenticity.

Baker’s dialogue is a festival of inarticulateness: thoughts evaporate before they make their way into words, sentences trail off, and almost every line of dialogue contains at least one like: “That’s like almost like a disability,” Sam marvels at Avery’s aptitude for connecting the dots in a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. There’s plenty of comedy in this; it also makes the characters deeply human.

Director Dean Paul Gibson shows exquisite sensitivity to Baker’s rhythms: he gives the script’s many pauses full play, allowing us to sit with the tension. And his casting is spot-on. Jesse Reid’s Avery is a buttoned-down bundle of awkwardness, practically hyperventilating when things get too intense. Shannon Chan-Kent digs below Rose’s outrageousness and reveals her fears: every expression of genuine emotion—hers or anyone else’s—is greeted by an eye-roll or scoff. And if this production were a dictionary, Rose’s wild dance in the aisles after work one night would be the entry for showstopper. As Sam, Haig Sutherland is open-hearted and vulnerable, his defeated postures and endlessly inventive grimaces showing the many flavours of Sam’s physical and emotional discomfort.

The audience is positioned where the movie theatre’s screen would be, so we are literally mirrored in the tiered seating of Lauchlin Johnston’s terrifically detailed set. In some scenes, the upstage projection booth itself becomes a screen of sorts; it’s fitting that it’s the domain of Rose, an object of fantasy. Alan Brodie’s richly textured lighting design ranges from the subtle wash of the flickering images on a movie screen to the harsh fluorescence when the movie’s over and the workers have to come in and clean up. Sound designer Murray Price fills the blackouts between scenes with lively interludes of rhythm-heavy music.

Before the digital era, watching movies used to be a communal experience—like watching theatre. The Flick asks us to slow down and be present together, even if it's uncomfortable, and like the best movies, it gives you plenty to think about after the house lights come up.