The film follows a teenage actress who is encouraged by her theater director to blur the lines between the character she is playing and her actual identity.

[3] Madeline is a lonely teenager who is part of a professional acting ensemble creating an experimental theater performance about The Three Little Pigs using improvisation.

She enjoys the company of the other actors and their director Evangeline, and dreads having to go home to her mother Regina who doesn't understand Madeline and often starts arguments.

In 2014, she began a series of workshops to devise the story, based on techniques she had learned at the Pig Iron Theatre Company in Philadelphia and the School of Making Thinking.

They used improvisation to create a variety of different scenes, many of which never ended up in the final film, and explored each performer's personal experiences, such as with mental illness.

At the beginning of each day of shooting, the cast and crew met for a short meditation and a chance for anyone to voice concerns they had with the production process.

Many of the scenes were improvised, so Connor and gaffer David April lit the sets in such a way that the actors and camera could freely move anywhere without a light being in the shot.

"[8][10][7] Harrison Atkins was the editor for the first four months of post production and made over a hundred different cuts of the movie exploring various ways the story could be told, but when he had to leave to work on a different show, Decker took on the editing herself.

With only two weeks left until the deadline for submitting to the Sundance Film Festival, Decker realized there was still a major problem with the ending, so she brought on David Barker for some last-minute changes.

[16] The New York Times called it a "seductive, disturbing, exasperating movie," noting it blurs the line between "fantasy and reality, certainly, but also between authenticity and artifice, theater and therapy, art and life.

"[17] In The New Yorker, Richard Brody said "it packs an epic’s worth of expressive detail, imaginative incident, emotional variety and intensity, and aesthetic invention," adding that "Howard delivers a performance that is one of the most distinctive, most varied, and most extreme in its expressive array and technical power, of any teen performer in the history of cinema.

"[18] The film was well-received by Entertainment Weekly, which praised the "nuanced" portrayal of the protagonist and her growth as a "self-possessed" character dealing with dominating authority figures.

[19] WBUR in Boston named it one of the best films of 2018, describing the plot as "three women perform an intricate psychological dance, with two locked in a vicious tug-of-war for a third's affections.