The Liberation of Rita Cooper

The most disturbing thing about The Liberation is how reasonable its first invitation sounds. A woman exhausted by work, family responsibilities and memories she cannot bear is offered an evening on the beach. Someone has noticed her unhappiness. Someone wants to listen. From that modest opening, Guy Nattiv develops a painful study of emotional dependency, anchored by a remarkable Carrie Coon. The filmmaker’s grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who left her family to join a cult, inspired this fictionalised story, a connection confirmed by The Guardian. That personal history gives the film an urgent underlying question: how do you understand someone whose search for relief caused such lasting damage to the people who loved her?

Set in 1980s New Jersey, the film introduces Rita Cooper as a woman whose apparently stable circumstances conceal an increasingly unmanageable inner life. Her bank job is draining, her father needs care, and the prospect of recording testimony about her Holocaust experiences brings buried anguish dangerously close to the surface. The screenplay by Guy Nattiv and Noa Berman-Herzberg makes an essential distinction between having survived and having recovered. Everyday demands continue regardless of whether she has the resources to meet them. Crucially, the household contains affection, humour and moments of shared pleasure. A relaxed family evening becomes especially poignant because it establishes something worth losing. Her eventual departure cannot be explained away by an obviously miserable marriage. Love exists here, but it has not given her a language for what she is enduring.

Carrie Coon makes that contradiction the centre of an exceptionally detailed performance. There is an almost administrative quality to her character’s exhaustion: she keeps fulfilling obligations while the effort of remaining available to everyone becomes harder to disguise. Small changes in posture and attention carry as much meaning as the emotional eruptions. When companionship begins to loosen her reserve, the pleasure feels tentative and private, something she scarcely trusts herself to enjoy. Later, within the commune, apparent serenity comes with a troubling loss of responsiveness. The performance allows relief and damage to occupy the same face. It also avoids treating vulnerability as a lack of intelligence. This is a capable adult whose capacity to question a relationship has been compromised by how desperately she needs what it initially provides.

Opposite her, Lily James gives the group’s leader a watchful confidence that turns ordinary conversation into an unequal exchange. She listens for the detail that will make her next intervention feel intimate, then gradually assumes the authority to explain another person’s life. Their first encounter at the bank offers a particularly sharp piece of dramatic irony: the future recruit can handle financial transactions professionally while remaining unprepared for the emotional transaction taking shape across her desk. The promise of female companionship makes the approach persuasive, especially for someone accustomed to being needed rather than considered. There are limitations, however. The leader’s history remains thin, and the suggestion of erotic attraction between the women opens a possibility the screenplay never sufficiently examines. Lily James supplies an unsettling ambiguity where the writing sometimes settles for familiar manipulative behaviour.

The family performances ensure that understanding the mother never cancels out the experience of being abandoned by her. Tracy Letts, who is married to Carrie Coon off screen, brings an unforced familiarity to the husband’s mixture of affection, complacency and mounting alarm. The casting adds an intriguing dimension, although the dramatic value lies in how convincingly the pair suggest accumulated habits and unfinished conversations. Bella Ramsey provides the film’s most forceful resistance as the daughter unwilling to accept the commune’s account of her mother’s happiness. Anger repeatedly breaks through the attempts at persuasion, giving the rescue mission an emotional untidiness that serves it well. Odessa Young brings a different openness to the older daughter, suggesting how two children raised in the same household can arrive at incompatible explanations for what has happened.

The film’s visual restraint is equally valuable. Cinematographers Tudor Vladimir Panduru and Fabian Gamper favour grain, subdued interiors and the seductive softness of outdoor light, allowing the commune’s appeal to register before its restrictions become overwhelming. The period detail feels inhabited rather than displayed. Production designer Brian Kane gives the domestic world a familiarity that makes its inability to offer refuge more affecting, while the score by Dascha Dauenhauer reinforces the pressure beneath routine activity. The recurring ticking sound is especially suggestive: time seems less like forward movement than another demand being made upon the protagonist. Cutting between life before and after her departure, the film invites us to scrutinise changes in her behaviour. Occasionally the structure interrupts its own momentum, but it also exposes the unsettling distance between feeling transformed and becoming less free.

Where The Liberation loses some precision is in its movement towards a more conventional thriller. A medical emergency supplies immediate stakes, yet the urgency narrows a story that has been strongest when allowing several uncomfortable truths to coexist. The supporting intrigue involving a journalist also feels too conveniently arranged, delivering information without the complexity afforded to the central relationship. More troubling is the reduced space for the mother’s interior life as the mechanics of escape take over. Her decisions remain consequential, but the film occasionally becomes busier explaining the danger around her than examining her participation in it. These weaknesses are noticeable precisely because the earlier material is so perceptive. The gradual surrender of judgment, conveyed through conversations and small concessions, is already frightening enough to sustain the drama.

Even with those reservations, The Liberation earns its emotional impact through the seriousness with which it regards everyone caught in this family rupture. Its strongest insight concerns the possession of another person’s story: once the leader persuades a follower that she alone understands her suffering, disagreement can be presented as proof that the outside world never cared. Guy Nattiv approaches that process with compassion while preserving its cruelty. Carrie Coon, meanwhile, gives the film a human specificity that survives its more familiar narrative turns. Her work leaves us with a woman whose longing for peace is comprehensible, whose choices are sometimes unbearable, and whose loved ones cannot simply reason her back into their lives. An affecting, imperfect drama with an outstanding central performance, The Liberation understands how much destruction can follow a promise of care.

The Liberation 
Written and directed by Guy Nattiv
Produced by Julia Lebedev, Roy Lee, Oren Moverman, Jaime Ray Newman, Steven Schneider, Eddie Vaisman
Starring: Carrie Coon, Lily James, Bella Ramsey, Odessa Young
Cinematography: Fabian Gamper, Tudor Vladimir Panduru
Edited by Sabine Hoffman
Production companies: Sight Unseen Pictures, Scythia Films, New Native Pictures, Spooky Pictures
Distributed by: Bleecker Street (United States)
Release dates: NC
Running time : 124 minutes

Seen on 10 September 2026 at the Deauville International Center