Carrie Coon, Lily James Soar in Telluride Cult Thriller — SkimNews
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- 'The Liberation' world-premiered at Telluride Film Festival on Friday night, with Deadline declaring it a standout in front of a packed audience
- Guy Nattiv directed from a story inspired by his real grandmother Rita Cooper, a Holocaust survivor who decades later joined an all-female cult led by a younger woman, abandoning her husband and two daughters
- Carrie Coon stars as Rita, a New Jersey bank assistant manager whose buried trauma from being the sole survivor of her Polish family interned in a Nazi concentration camp makes her vulnerable to seduction
- Lily James plays Ricki, the cult leader running a rural farm commune, in a portrayal Deadline calls a career high point that avoids stereotypical cult-leader tropes
- Bella Ramsey and Odessa Young play Rita's daughters Jo and Ella, who infiltrate the commune to rescue their mother, with Ramsey's role driving the 'pulse-pounding thriller' second half
- Tracy Letts plays Reuben, Rita's husband and Coon's real-life spouse, in a story the reviewer notes 'belongs to the ladies' even with a male director at the helm
- Bleecker Street holds distribution rights; the film is dedicated to the late Andrew Karpen, the distributor's founder who was initially involved in developing it
Why it matters: The IndieWire headline positioning Coon alongside Andrew Scott as TV stars 'launched into the Oscar Race' signals the festival's commercial stakes beyond critical praise, while Nattiv's deeply personal project — fictionalizing his grandmother's cult entrapment — gives a female-driven thriller uncommon emotional weight ahead of Bleecker Street's release.
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