Lars and the Real Girl

Lars and the Real Girl (2007) is a Craig Gillespie tragicomedy you can watch online on iFILM. Ryan Gosling plays Lars, a painfully shy young man in a snowbound northern town who one day tells his family he has a girlfriend.

The catch: Bianca isn't real. She's a life-size doll Lars ordered off the web, and he treats her as flesh and blood — talks to her, wheels her to church, introduces her around town. His brother and sister-in-law (Paul Schneider, Emily Mortimer) are horrified, but the local doctor (Patricia Clarkson) tells them to play along instead of arguing. So the whole community does. Meanwhile a real woman, his coworker Margo, waits for Lars to say a single word to her.

Nancy Oliver's screenplay earned an Academy Award nomination, and it's easy to see why: a premise built for a crude joke becomes a quiet story about grief, isolation and small-town kindness. Caught a couple of years before stardom, Gosling gives one of his gentlest performances. Stream Lars and the Real Girl (2007) online on iFILM.