If you went to see Labor Day, you somehow got the wrong end of the stick. The critics warned you not to go. It racked up an impressive set of one- and two-star reviews across the board, so you really should have stayed at home. No one thought that a film with a pie motif was a good idea.

But, you thought, Jason Reitman has made some awesome films, so surely there must be something to it. Also, a melodrama about a depressed housewife and her son being taken hostage by an escaped killer on the run sounds pretty scary. Quite frankly it is, and it's certainly not a subject to joke about.

But then it turns out that this dude can make a really awesome chilli! Not to mention prepare some tastilicious breakfast muffins and even bake a pie. After all this cooking, it is only natural that Kate Winslet's character, Adele, should falls in love with the gentle, murderous rogue (Josh Brolin). She's been kicking around that big old house for years, suffering from a debilitating depression that no one seems that fussed about treating or helping her to manage (relax, guys! It's set in the 1980s). The tantalisingly fraught situation leads to no end of emotional conundrums for Adele's 13-year-old son (Gattlin Griffith), who narrates the film retrospectively as a 30-year-old man.

But the film is not just far-fetched (bear with me), it's also disarmingly sincere, which is a really potent combination of cringe, particularly for a British audience. The movie starts with little Henry trying to cheer up his lonely mum by giving her "husband coupons" and taking her out on a date, innocently oblivious to the part of the "husband duty" he can't fulfill. Argh! Wise up, Henry! … Actually, no. So you've got an outlandish plot, cartoon silhouettes for characters, an awkward script and embarrassing tenderness. Why on Earth did I find myself loving the film?

The answer probably lies with the common denominator of all cinematic guilty pleasures – enjoying a film for its mood rather than its all-round craft. And Labor Day works as a nostalgia film. The main characters spend most of the film reminiscing about things that happened long ago in hazy, soft-light flashbacks. Their listless longing and sighing in fields of grass almost gives the film a restlessness reminiscent of Badlands (sorry, Terrence Malick), and the story is structured around memory and the sensation of churning over the ghosts and shadows of the past.

Shade is also an important element of Eric Steelberg's cinematography, which seems intent on making the film shimmer. It also links the idea of memory to photography. Each frame looks like an old photo – one that you took on your analogue camera in the 1980s and is now pleasingly faded and speckled with dust. There's a lens flare in almost every scene: at times they're so large they bleach half of the screen in a sparkling white.

Sometimes the dissolves are so noticeable that you see a prolonged double-exposure, like you might have on old photos from the end of your roll of film; this also adds to the dreamlike, nostalgic sheen of the film.

Most of the story takes place inside a house of many windows, and the characters' bodies are always lit up by the streaks of sunlight and shade seeping in through the net curtains. People romantically memorialise the past all the time, and this movie looks like how those memories might look if they were recorded on film.

Even the flat, starved script puts you in a nostalgic mood. I mean, what's not quotable about "'How do you take your coffee?' – "As is." Or: "You're a fine boy. Anyone who says otherwise isn't worth your time"? OK, OK, so it's not exactly Nora Ephron. But the simple sentences and sentiments remind you of childhood innocence. There's an inexplicably long shot of an ET poster on Henry's bedroom door – remember watching that as a kid? Oh, and there are also several references to the 1967 Bonnie and Clyde film (which, by the way, was also once classed as a "nostalgia film"... ).

So on the one hand, we must ask: what was Reitman thinking? But on the other hand, nostalgia is a sweet, syrupy cocktail of a mood, and sometimes it's pleasurable to slip on your rose-tinted glasses and indulge. Labor Day is treacly and nostalgic, but surely cinema can do worse things than shimmer at you for a couple of hours.