I left the cinema feeling like I’d just woken from a very beautiful dream after watching Stéphane Lafleur’s Tu Dors Nicole (You’re Sleeping Nicole) at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival. Cute, quirky, and just a little absurd, the film has all the qualities of surreality—strange characters, unexplainable happenings, and an overriding sense that nothing is really as important as it seems.

22-year-old Nicole’s (Julianne Côté) vacationing parents have put her in charge of their suburban home for the summer, leaving her to spend those hot months mowing grass and working a dead-end job in the small Quebec town’s thrift-store. Along with her best friend, Véronique (Catherine St-Laurent), she spends the rest of the daylight hours biking around, impulse-buying with her new credit card, and drinking beers while her brother’s band records an offensively loud album in her parents’ living room. At night, Nicole discovers what her eclectic neighbours do while they think no one is looking. She hasn’t been sleeping well lately, and spends many insomniac hours ambling through the dark streets.

Night and day are almost indistinguishable in this grey scale world, thanks to Sara Mishara’s breath-taking cinematography. LaFleur employs very few background extras, enhancing the film’s dreamlike quality. The streets are almost as deserted during the day as they are at midnight, and so Nicole appears as a lone figure drifting through an unending series of empty frames. Time likewise is unending, and each day feels just as hot, stagnant and aimless as the last. Events don’t follow a classic cause-and-effect sequence; just as in a dream, they occur almost inexplicably.

The surreal treatment of time and space recreates a moment many of us experience growing up: the moment we realized that mini-golf isn’t as fun at 22 as it was when we were 7 and that buying ice cream with a Visa card doesn’t make it free. It recalls that painful moment when we learned that best friends don’t always tell us the truth, and that ex-boyfriends move on with their lives, even when we don’t. Finally, Tu Dors Nicole reminds us of that moment we noticed that summer holidays can be just as dull as school—that waking life can be just as strange as dreams.

In the stifling heat of yet another inconsequential day, the girls ask, “Is this going to be our summer?” In this seemingly simple question lie a million more, pushing the audience to reflect on their own lives. Do we, like Nicole, bump through our days buying ice cream after ice cream to fill the time? Are we, too, passing through life in a half-awake stupor? Watching one slow moment slip into the next, it’s hard not to ask: “Is this going to be my summer? Is this going to be my life?”