The manic pixie dream girl is alive and well in Shane Belcourt’s Toronto-set comedy Red Rover. And while the talented Cara Gee brings some serious charisma to the oft-derided role, her character naturally only exists to help an average dude break out of a mid-life funk.

The average dude this time is Damon (Kristian Bruun, “Orphan Black”), a geologist who glumly lives in the tiny basement of the house he shares with his ex-wife, while she lives upstairs with her always-shirtless Australian boyfriend, loudly having sex at all hours of the night. Because Damon is the kind of loser who would rather just deal with it, naively holding on to the hope that maybe they’ll get back together someday, instead of, you know, moving out and doing anything else. That is until he meets aspiring musician Phoebe (Gee) one night and finds the answer to all his problems.

This is the kind of movie that has its love interests meet while he’s searching the beach for metal and she’s dressed completely in a spacesuit. It turns out that Phoebe is actually on the job, handing out flyers to passersby for a chance to be selected for a one-way trip to Mars for some sort of bizarre reality show/colonizing expedition. Damon decides to go for it and Phoebe offers to help with the video application and the rest is screenwriting 101. It’s all sort of reminiscent of Colin Trevorrow’s Safety Not Guaranteed, except without the laughs or complex character psychologies.

During his in-person interview for the Mars trip, Damon gives a rousing speech about going to Mars for the right reasons, to start fresh instead of just expanding on what human’s have built up and destroyed on Earth. Can we apply this to quirky indie romantic comedies now too?