Wonderland: a sweet, inviting, family-friendly film from Singapore.

This intimately shot feature is that modern marvel: a simple character-driven story well told.

Chai Yee-Wei’s tender, deeply felt, and human-scaled Wonderland—which I just saw at the Palm Springs International Film Festival—is set in 1980s Singapore as Asia’s rising economic tiger is beginning its global ascent and looking to America as the promised land of advancement. It pivots around the protective white lies family members tell each other to keep life copacetic, which, in the end, were known as lies by those involved all along.

This beautiful heartwarming story features a terse, illiterate, and solitary Chinese father, Loke, owner of a Singapore joss paper shop, whose only child Eileen has secretly won acceptance to decidedly un-Singaporean Columbia University. But Wonderland is also about creating a family with those around you, especially between elderly men oft forgotten in almost every society in today’s impossibly shallow youth-and-beauty-obsessed Instagram and Tik-Tok hellscape.

Wonderland offers an inside view of the working-class Hokkien-speaking community of Singapore before the world discovered founder Lee Kuan Yew’s fiercely meritocratic island juggernaut. The film feels slightly long and redundant, advertising its feel-good qualities a tad much, with supporting performances that can at times feel trite and saccharine. It also is a bit coy about whether the two Singaporean girlfriends off to school in New York are hiding something a bit more intimate than Eileen’s income status. But Wonderland’s trivial flaws are forgiven because the evocatively shot film is a modern marvel: a character-driven story well-told. See it at your earliest opportunity.

Wonderland gets a zero on the 0-10 Saltburn/Poor Things Disgust-O-Meter (10 being a total gross-out). It defines family-friendly.