‘The Liberation’ Review: Carrie Coon Joins a Cult, and One of Her Best Performances Follows

TIFF: Guy Nattiv's film draws on his grandmother's horrifying experiences, giving the actress a role she can really sink her teeth into. The rest of the film could benefit from that bite, though.

While the Oscar race has begun to take shape, many prognosticators have already singled out two early Best Actress contenders: Julianne Moore in “The Debut” and Carrie Coon in “The Liberation.” While both films occupy very different tonal spaces — Jesse Eisenberg’s “The Debut” is a delightfully daffy riff on the musical, while Guy Nattiv‘s “The Liberation” is a wrenching drama about grief and guilt — their leading roles share similarities. Strikingly, we see both Coon’s Rita Cooper and Moore’s Mona Friedman struggle with families (one husband, two kids) who seem to take them for granted, often baffled when their mothers and wives don’t magically appear to tend to their every need.

But, without spoiling Eisenberg’s film, there is one other major difference: During a post-dinner sequence in “The Liberation,” we see Rita, her husband Reuben (Coon’s real-life partner Tracy Letts), and their kids Jo (Odessa Young) and Ella (Bella Ramsey) happily unwind together. That sort of giddy joy (yes, it’s also fueled by some pot) doesn’t ever happen in the Friedman household, but that it does in the Coopers’? It’s just one of many tiny heartbreaks that round out Nattiv’s film. There are more to come.

Nattiv’s film — which he also wrote with Noa Berman-Herzberg — draws on his own grandmother’s experiences, adding another wrenching edge to “The Liberation.” Like Coon’s on-screen Rita, Nattiv’s grandmother was a Holocaust survivor whose long-simmering grief and guilt eventually lead her to join a cult, headed up here by a transfixing and unnerving Lily James. Nattiv and Berman-Herzberg’s script cross-cuts between pre-cult Rita and deep-in-it “Naia” (James’ Ricki adores giving her followers new names, textbook cult leader stuff), showing how and why Rita made the choice for her so-called “liberation.”

Before she becomes Naia, Rita is at the mercy of both common middle-aged concerns (her aging father, her boring marriage, her growing-too-fast kids, her changing body, her career malaise, a sense she hasn’t ever accomplished anything, not really) and extraordinary emotions that could sink anyone (her horrifying experience as a very young Jewish child during the Holocaust, always on her mind but further exacerbated by her upcoming participation in a long-form video interview about it).

When the preternaturally confident Ricki walks into the bank where Rita works, she’s less taken with the stack of cash the younger woman is there to deposit than with the easy way she sizes up Rita’s emotional state. There’s no judgment — just an invitation to join Ricki and her friends at the beach that night. Wouldn’t it be nice to hang out with other women who get it?

Well, you’ll see. In the current cult world of Naia (the film is set in the early ’80s), she’s been gone for months, living in a far-flung commune with Ricki and a raft of other women (all with new names and long-gone families too). But Jo and Ella, who we will get to know much better over the course of the film, have not given up on their mom. And based on the postcard she sent them (behind Ricki’s back, of course), some part of her hasn’t given up on them either. When the sisters arrive at the commune, a rattled Ricki tries some of her old tricks, offering up sisterhood in the form of manual labor, little food, and psychedelic mushrooms. One sister kind of goes for it; one very much does not.

The braided nature of the script adds tension to the storytelling, but it matters less than the story’s emotion. How and why Rita would fall into Ricki’s trap is not the central attraction of “The Liberation” — what she’s offering the troubled Rita is clear enough for anyone who knows how these things work — but the way it feels is what really sticks. (Though, a brief foray into fantasy dangles the possibility of a wholly different, non-cult attraction to Ricki that is promptly snatched back and never referred to again.) And much of that comes from Coon’s riveting performance: a work of subtle calculations, a twitch of a smile here, a deadening of the eyes there.

Rita has long felt like she was standing on the outside of her life, and the brief flashes we see of the joy the group (before it so clearly becomes a cult) elicits in her, the feeling she is part of something, is profound. It makes her later time in the cult so much worse, with a slack-jawed, blank-staring Naia trying to tell her kids that no, no, things are really great, she’s happier than she’s ever been, this is what she wants. That she needs to be freed from this is a bit of a given, but “The Liberation” gently pokes holes in the idea that her “outside” life is so much better. Perhaps there is no place for Rita in this world, a horrific revelation that Coon’s performance drives home with significant power.

But that query, like others, is not always satisfyingly interrogated by the film. Coon’s talent and focus carry much here. Ramsey’s work as Ella and an audience surrogate, meanwhile, is some of the young performer’s best yet, and really worth rooting for. But deeper exploration is sometimes lacking. Much of Ricki’s “message” is couched in mealy therapy-speak. There’s little investigation into where she came from, even when her past doings become a large part of a thin subplot. Making one supporting character also function as a journalist seems like a fairly easy way to shove in some necessary exposition.

Mostly, that means that whenever Coon is not on screen, it’s inevitable to wonder where the hell she is and why she’s not gracing every moment. Rita is the center of this world, but she proves elusive in the very moments when we’d expect to see her, even if her reactions aren’t what we’d expect or hope for. Part of that might be by design — here, after all, is a story about a woman consumed, sublimated, erased — but our desire for more of her leaves the story at a remove in the moments when we should be most invested. “The Liberation” is about losing Rita Cooper. Please, let us see more of Carrie Coon on that journey.

Grade: B

“The Liberation” screened at the 2026 Telluride Film Festival and the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. Bleecker Street will release it in limited theaters in November, before a wide release in January 2027.