‘The Liberation’ Review: Carrie Coon, Bella Ramsey and Lily James in Guy Nattiv’s Devastatingly Empathetic Cult Drama

As Rita Cooper (Carrie Coon) shivers outside in the cold, waiting to get picked up from a sleepover gone awry with a not-yet-cult, its leader, Ricki (Lily James), follows her out with a mug of tea. “I recognize your pain. I see what’s underneath it,” she tells her. “It’s my gift, seeing people for who they really are.”

It’s Ricki alone, Ricki suggests, who grasps exactly how alienated Rita has become from her own seemingly stable life. It’s Ricki who thinks to ask questions about how unseen she feels, Ricki who gets what Rita is running from, Ricki who sees what she’s running toward. By the time Rita’s ride arrives, she’s decided to stay. There’s nowhere better for her to go, no one else who understands or even could.

The Liberation

The Bottom Line Heavy with powerhouse performances.

Venue: Telluride Film Festival
Cast: Carrie Coon, Bella Ramsey, Lily James, Odessa Young, Tracy Letts, Jamie Ray Newman
Director: Guy Nattiv
Screenwriters: Guy Nattiv, Noa Berman Herzberg
2 hours 4 minutes

Or so Rita believes. In The Liberation, writer-director Guy Nattiv (Skin, Golda) grapples with the choices made by the real Rita, his own grandmother, extending her the profound empathy and lack of judgment she found so hard to come by in life. It’s a heartbreaking and profound act of love, anchored by a trio of powerhouse performances in Coon, James, and Bella Ramsey.

The script by Nattiv and Noa Berman Herzberg cuts between two timelines. Appropriately for a film concerned with the sort of deep-rooted trauma that continues to reverberate through the decades, it does so without warning, such that it sometimes takes a beat for us to figure out which one we’re in. (Coon’s hair, longer and darker in the past, tends to be the most obvious giveaway.)

In 1982 — the entire decade captured with quiet authenticity by production designer Brian Kane — Rita leads what would scan to many like a good-enough life. True, she has a bank job she doesn’t particularly enjoy and an elderly father (Ken Kramer) clearly on the decline. But she also has a nice husband (Tracy Letts, Coon’s spouse in real life), two kind and clever daughters (Ramsey’s Ella and Odessa Young’s Jo), a comfortable-looking house in suburban New Jersey. She herself seems unable to articulate why she’s weighed down by such a deep depression that simply getting out of bed is a daily struggle.

By sometime around 1985, Rita leads what looks to most onlookers, including the very worried daughters who’ve come to find her, like a terrible life — estranged from her friends and family, firmly under Ricki’s thumb in some remote rural commune. Even as she insists she’s never felt happier, the hollowness of her cheeks and the lines around her eyes tell a different story; a shocked Ella describes Rita and Ricki’s other followers as looking “like they just got out of the camps.”

The comparison is not random. Rita is a Holocaust survivor, and so scarred by the experience she can barely name her hometown without hyperventilating. The one person she has been able to talk through that dark chapter of her life with at all is Ricki, who calls out the “weight” Rita is carrying within moments of their chance meeting at the bank. (“Slow metabolism,” Rita initially responds, misunderstanding, in one of the movie’s few laugh lines.)

The Liberation makes no attempt to soften the downward spiral Ricki will take Rita on — in fact, the life-or-death crisis that brings Rita’s choice to a head is one of the few elements of the film that feel undercooked, hinging on choices by Young’s Jo that seem made more out of narrative convenience than organic character development. But it also makes no attempt to downplay Ricki’s allure to Rita.

Where most stories about cults dwell on what makes them alien (the sinister rituals, the outlandish beliefs, the mysterious leader), The Liberation is more interested in what makes them heartbreakingly ordinary. Ricki is charismatic but not otherwordly; if anything, the fact that James is able to seduce or threaten without appearing to do much at all is what makes Ricki extra formidable. Her followers (what we see of them) are not mindless fools; they simply yearn for some feeling or meaning they’ve failed to find in normie life, but hope to find in the forest with a commanding guru and an endless supply of shrooms.

Nor does Rita, once we’ve spent some time inside her head, come off as completely incomprehensible for falling in with Ricki. In the younger woman’s presence, Rita finds that the ominous ticking clock in her mind goes silent. Her humdrum life gives way to beach bonfires at sunset (lensed by Tudor Vladimir Panduru and Fabian Gamper in stunning dusky blues and pinks) and skinny-dipping in the river. Her pain becomes something to be shared with a caring audience, rather than privately medicated into oblivion. Anything starts to look possible in Ricki’s presence, even healing.

As Rita falls deeper and deeper into the cult, Coon carries her through every wild extreme of emotion: sobbing despair, white-hot fury, manic elation. But it’s the subtler moments that really sell her harrowing arc. It’s the hopelessness that seems to drag her shoulders down from the moment she sits up in the morning, the shy private smiles she allows herself after her first encounters with Ricki and, increasingly, her helpless paralysis as Ricki’s domineering ways turn her into a bystander in her own life, to ultimately shocking effect.

We might be horrified by the choices Rita is making — and Ramsey, the third but by no means least of the film’s central trio, wears Ellie’s worry and anguish and fury all over her face, never letting us forget for even a moment the fresh hurt that Rita is causing in her attempts to outrun hers. But it’s Coon’s finely tuned performance that ensures we understand at every point exactly why Rita is making those choices. If the title of the film starts to seem, to us, like a cruel irony, it’s one we come to realize feels to Rita like anything but.