Nobody makes clumsier social allegories than Guy Nattiv. His first American effort, the 2018 short Skin, followed a violent white supremacist who was kidnapped, drugged, and held hostage while his entire skin was tattooed jet-black as revenge for a hate crime; it was the most-embarrassing Oscar winner in a year when Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody dominated the ceremony. That is arguably more tasteful than how he frames the true story at the heart of his most personal effort to date, The Liberation. Inspired by his grandmother’s indoctrination into a cult in the early 1980s, Nattiv keeps attempting to draw heavy-handed parallels between her youth in a concentration camp and recruitment into an organization that asked her to shun family, healthcare, and any other unwelcome intrusions from the outside world.
Rita Cooper’s (Carrie Coon) time being brainwashed by younger cult leader Ricki King (Lily James) is harrowing on its own, but looks deeply insignificant when framed as a continuation of her trauma as a Holocaust survivor. The Liberation trivializes some of the gravest crimes against humanity for how it frames the all-female cult’s secluded Harmonia commune, lingering on the fences that separate its crimes from the outside world and introducing its members doing unpaid manual labor in near-matching outfits. If such visual parallels weren’t clear enough, Rita’s youngest daughter Ella (Bella Ramsey) stresses that her distant mom looks like “she’s just got out of the camps.” The context of Rita’s childhood is important in establishing why she’d be coerced by a group leader adamant she can rid her of the horrors she’s carried her entire life, but that unimaginably horrifying past is invoked so clumsily it becomes distasteful.
These are flaws with Nativ and Noa Berman-Herzberg’s screenplay, not Coon’s characteristically terrific performance. Told across two separate storylines––in 1982, when the depressed office drone Rita first meets Ricki, and 1984, when Ella and her older daughter Jo (Odessa Young) track down the cult’s new commune––the actress effectively articulates how unprocessed emotions could lead her into a cult’s warm embrace, and why she would be so reluctant to any calls to deprogram once caught in its web. Her ease in such a demanding role is likely because we saw her tackle a more challenging variant on this grief-avoidance storyline during three seasons of The Leftovers, where each surreal detour was a result of trying to regain some sense of order after losing her family. The Liberation, where it’s much easier to get an emotional handle on this material, is less demanding by default. She makes the relationship between her past and present seem messier, more human than the neatly drawn continuation of past trauma the screenplay suggests. It’s based on true horrors, but comes across like a too-polished Martha Marcy May Marlene.
The Liberation is most effective in its 1984 stretches––although the absence of a delightfully crotchety Tracy Letts, stunt cast as Coon’s husband in the 1982 sequences, is felt––as the younger daughter tries saving her mother while the older becomes hypnotized by Ricki’s way of life. It increasingly resembles a thriller about walls closing in on the family, especially when Ella realizes how disastrous the anti-healthcare policy could be if her diabetic sister is left to fend for herself, and Ramsey has one of her best theatrical showcases as the emotional center of this stretch.
In fact, the only weak link of this ensemble is James as the cult leader; she fails to convince as an emotionally manipulative figure who could bring women her senior under her spell. The brief suggestion that it’s because she awakens suppressed sapphic desires is more tangible, though the screenplay discards that idea almost as soon as it’s introduced. James is a particularly strange casting decision considering she replaced Vicky Krieps, whose offbeat energy can have an undercurrent of menace if applied correctly. It’s admirable that James wanted to be cast against type so boldly, but she doesn’t have the built-in intensity required to make me suspend disbelief that she could manipulate her way under someone’s skin. Through her leadership, it becomes a cult of no personality.
The Liberation is Nattiv’s strongest effort to date, but that’s not saying much, and it’s thanks entirely to an almost uniformly excellent ensemble elevating his material. He remains as clumsy as ever in transforming his stories into incisive social commentary.
The Liberation screened at the BFI London Film Festival and opens on January 8, 2027.
The post BFI London Review: The Liberation Finds Carrie Coon Elevating a Clumsy Cult Drama first appeared on The Film Stage.
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