‘The Julia Set’ Review: Chase Infiniti Leads a Strong Ensemble as a College Math Genius in Algebra That Doesn’t Quite Balance the Equation

The still waters and intriguing depths conveyed by Chase Infiniti in The Julia Set offer proof positive that the magnetic One Battle After Another discovery has the goods to carry a movie. She also has robust support from an ensemble that includes Christopher Briney, Nina Hoss, Jason Isaacs and Gillian Anderson, an impressive assembly, especially for a first-time writer-director. Niki Byrne provides each of them with incisive characterizations and sharp dialogue, but her film fails to bring the psychological weight necessary for us to invest much in the mismatched central relationship.

The dynamic at the heart of the movie is that of a Black woman from a family of modest means, accustomed to downplaying her formidable mathematical abilities for fear of drawing too much attention, and a white teaching assistant from wealth and privilege who recognizes and supports her talent until it outshines his. But Byrne leaves the economic and class divide mostly unexplored, instead focusing on the corrosive effects of academic competitiveness on a romance.

The Julia Set

The Bottom Line Less than the sum of its parts.

Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Special Presentations)
Cast: Chase Infiniti, Christopher Briney, Nina Hoss, Carmen Ejogo, Chloe Bailey, Nico Hiraga, Liz Lin, Alex Dillard, Jason Isaacs, Gillian Anderson
Director-screenwriter: Niki Byrne
1 hour 52 minutes

On a scene-by-scene basis the film is engrossing, but its conflicts lack the emotional shading to keep us invested in the characters, particularly when one of them refuses to hear the clanging alarm bells.

That would be Julia (Infiniti), who falls into a relationship with her initially charming teaching assistant Pascal (Briney, doing a 180 from his brooding romantic on The Summer I Turned Pretty) at a fictional East Coast college. He ushers her into an elite group of young mathematicians preparing for the notoriously difficult Putnam Exam under the guidance of Dr. Zatlan (Hoss), a professor whose mentorship generally tends to come in witheringly blunt dismissals. “Spectacularly unsatisfying” is how she describes the students’ work on last week’s assignments the first time Julia joins the group.

Julia grew up nearby and chose a college that allowed her to stay close to her family, especially her adoring brother Evan (Alex Dillard), who has Down syndrome. She has a warm rapport with her mother Holly (Carmen Ejogo), who endorses her daughter’s dream to go to MIT but worries that Julia obsesses over her studies to the exclusion of all else. “Please dive into the college life,” she urges her.

That is kind of what she’s doing with Pascal, which both thrills and concerns her far more man-savvy roommate Erin (Chloe Bailey, consistently delightful, albeit while stuck playing a stock bestie). Pascal’s family name, Mandelbrot, is chiseled into the façade of the school library and his father Aleksander (Jason Isaacs) is a famous math scholar and recipient of the prestigious Fields Medal. That makes Pascal a math-geek nepo baby, meaning he has a lot to prove.

Just how much becomes apparent when he invites Julia — after fast-forwarding through the I-love-you and apartment-key phase of the relationship at dizzying speed — to spend a long weekend with his parents. That devolves into a needling humiliation ritual wherein Aleksander reaffirms his superior intellect during a quietly savage chess game with his son. The location shift to the folks’ fancy pile of bricks injects a shot of prickly energy into the film as Pascal’s mother Anne (Anderson, divine) visibly flinches every time her egotistical monster of a husband walks into a room or opens his mouth.

Aleksander and Anne are fabulous characters, played to the hilt by Isaacs and Anderson. The unspoken friction between them — dating back to when she was his gifted student, before stepping aside to let him soak up all the spotlight — makes them like a less overtly hostile and more moderately boozy math-department George and Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Not that Anne doesn’t toss down the red wine just to get through lunch and endure the sourness left hanging in the air by Aleksander’s supercilious idea of conversation. After eviscerating Pascal at the chess board, Aleksander sits Julia down for a chat, aware that she has read his work. His opener? “Tell me about my book.”

The poisonousness of that visit seeps into Pascal’s bloodstream. He hasn’t even started the car to leave before telling Julia he thinks they should break up, while she tells him he doesn’t have to buy into his father’s “little cult of genius.” But as it becomes evident to him that Julia is more than capable of outperforming him in the Putnam Exam, both his self-loathing and his resentment of her begin spiraling fast.

He starts popping Adderall during all-night study sessions, turning violent and abusive when he comes home to find Julia in his apartment making a surprise dinner. “You’re like this little nightmare I’ve created for myself,” he spits out contemptuously. But Julia nonetheless keeps making excuses for him and allowing him to manipulate her with textbook guilt tactics.

This is already way past the point where many will have lost patience with Julia’s continued willingness to be a punching bag and Pascal’s failure to learn anything from the hell of growing up with a father like Aleksander, instead turning into a more unhinged — and heavy-handed — chip off the old block. It’s chiefly because Infiniti is so good in a performance largely defined by Julia’s interiority that we stay with her.

The more rewarding closing-act developments come when Anne steps in to give Julia an unexpected — if slightly platitudinous — pep talk that will never come from her son or husband, or even from frosty Dr. Zatlan when she finally notice’s Julia’s extraordinary potential. The professor almost seems to share Pascal’s view that the pressure the two of them feel to strive for excellence cannot compare. “Nobody expects anything from you,” Pascal hisses at Julia in the most explicit summation of the movie’s key questions about who has the right to wear the genius crown and why should the club be so exclusionary.

This seems a valid point worth making, but The Julia Project tends to be either too emphatic or too insipid to make it effectively. In the end, we care about Julia mostly because Infiniti shows a living, breathing humanity that the unsatisfying film lacks.