‘The Julia Set’ Review: Chase Infiniti Is a Genius in a Movie Lacking Serious Brain Power

TIFF: The "One Battle After Another" breakout heads to college in Niki Byrne's confounding mash-up of "Good Will Hunting" verve and "Sleeping with the Enemy" shlock.

Being a genius isn’t easy — both real life and the movies love to tell us that — but it’s even harder when said genius isn’t even comfortable with the moniker. One of the first things we learn about Julia Fischer (rising star Chase Infiniti) is that, despite her serious brain power, she has a tendency to pretend to not know the stuff she very, very much does. This observation is made early on in Niki Byrne’s “The Julia Set” by Julia’s T.A. Pascal (Christopher Briney, putting a dark edge on his “The Summer I Turned Pretty” charm) in an attempt to be both a) flirty and b) absolutely sure his word is gospel.

Both of his gambits work. Julia is suddenly smitten. She’s also at his mercy, completely letting him have the upper hand.

That Pascal’s motives aren’t exactly pure are baked into the premise of Byrne’s film, which dimly interrogates some classic material: what if someone was booksmart, but completely out of their depth when it comes to the way the world actually works? That Julia is young and emotionally immature becomes a spectacular crutch for the film, which pummels its ostensible protagonist with enough bad decisions and worse instincts that rooting for her becomes a mere plea for survival. Please, let her get out of this. Let us, too.

Julia is used to being one of the only girls (if not the only girl) in the room, something Byrne and cinematographer Antonio Calvache delight in showing us in repeated shots that still pack some of the film’s only real power. When Pascal turns his attentions to Julia (swiftly, suspiciously), he grants her entry into a rarefied space: a study group led by the fierce Dr. Zatlan (Julia Hoss), who is preparing a cadre of math geniuses for the Putnam Competition, where they will take arguably the hardest test in the world (and, no, not just in the math world).

That Julia wants to excel at the test is a given, mostly because it’s what we expect of her (math genius, math competition, you, uh, do the math). But, like so many other details in the film, what we learn about Julia we are simply told. Everyone has a different take on her, but Julia holds herself at such a remove that it’s impossible to feel much for her. That’s clearly part of the formula here — this is a young woman who has gotten way too used to feeling out of place — but it does make it hard to invest in her, even when played by such a natural talent as Infiniti.

The Putnam prep has to also compete with Julia’s budding relationship with Pascal, which is both the film’s most frustrating element and its most human. The guy is a walking red flag, but Julia (again! who is so smart!) can’t see it. He has obvious anger issues, a deeply fucked home life, no friends, a propensity to extreme emotional reactions (when he breaks out with a too-early “I love you,” the TIFF premiere audience groaned), an interest in incredibly obvious gaslighting, and a heck of a wandering eye when it comes to Julia’s homework. She’s unquestionably better than him.

Despite the darkness of that plotting, Byrne keeps an oddly light tone to the feature. Mostly, that rankles, but during a weekend trip to meet Pascal’s parents, the film suddenly sparks to life. Pascal’s father Aleksander (Jason Isaacs) is a Fields Medal-winning super-brain. His mother Anne (Gillian Anderson) was once his very promising student. It’s a tale as old as time, and one already playing out in the next generation. That Pascal’s parents loathe each other is obvious, but the catty way they attack each other (and Pascal and Julia) is darkly delightful, Isaacs stomping his way through his limited scenes and Anderson unable to huff, sigh, and roll her eyes at her monstrous husband. Where’s their movie?

Alas, it’s soon back to Julia and Pascal’s school, time for more studying and more elementary-level brainwashing. And, about that school! Like many of the smaller details of “The Julia Set,” the ways and means of “GCU” confound. Julia is a freshman in the early months of her college career (Thanksgiving weekend figures prominently), but she’s already extremely close with her roommate Erin (an effervescent Chloe Bailey). Are the two friends from home? That’s never answered. Julia bemoans that her family doesn’t understand what she does or the level of her talent, but her mother (Carmen Ejogo) is obsessed with her transferring to MIT.

Also not clear: how we’re supposed to feel about their university. On one hand, it’s a good enough school to attract Julia, but it’s a bottom-of-the-barrel choice for Pascal, whose father is a rich math genius (OK, sure). Rich enough, in fact, to slap the family name on a paid-for hall at the school and a disarmingly swank apartment for the kid, but not rich enough to get his failson into his own alma mater. Good luck guessing the setting of the film, the location of the school, even the year it takes place in. It’s as if it was flung out of space, and not particularly well.

At one point in the film, Julia looks over Pascal’s work and notes that, while his answers are ostensibly right, he’s taking way too long to get to them. There are easier ways to work these problems, she says. There are more elegant ways. Such is the case with “The Julia Set.” There are better ways to do this, easier ways, more elegant ways. It doesn’t have to feel like so much, well, homework.

Grade: C

“The Julia Set” premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.