Carrie Coon Elevates Guy Nattiv's Clumsy Cult Drama The Liberation

Guy Nattiv's The Liberation, inspired by his grandmother's indoctrination into a cult in the early 1980s, screened at the BFI London Film Festival and opens on January 8, 2027 — and it survives its own screenplay almost entirely thanks to Carrie Coon.

The film tells the true story of Rita Cooper (Coon), a Holocaust survivor recruited by an all-female cult led by Ricki King (Lily James). The review, published by The Film Stage, credits Coon with a "characteristically terrific performance" while faulting the screenplay, written by Nattiv and Noa Berman-Herzberg, for how it frames the material.

What's the problem with the allegory?

Nattiv draws heavy-handed parallels between Rita's youth in a concentration camp and her recruitment into an organization that demanded she shun family, healthcare and the outside world. The reviewer argues this framing trivializes "some of the gravest crimes against humanity."

The commune, called Harmonia, is shot with lingering attention to its fences and to members performing unpaid manual labor in near-matching outfits. The point is underlined when Rita's youngest daughter Ella (Bella Ramsey) observes that her distant mother looks like "she's just got out of the camps."

The reviewer's verdict is blunt: the context of Rita's childhood matters for understanding her coercion, but the invocation of that past is "so clumsy it becomes distasteful."

How strong is the cast?

The story unfolds across two timelines: 1982, when the depressed office worker Rita first meets Ricki, and 1984, when Ella and her older sister Jo (Odessa Young) track down the cult's new commune.

Coon anchors both. The review notes her ease in the role likely stems from three seasons of The Leftovers, where she played a more challenging variant on the same grief-avoidance arc. Here, she makes the relationship between Rita's past and present "messier, more human than the neatly drawn continuation of past trauma the screenplay suggests."

Bella Ramsey delivers "one of her best theatrical showcases" in the 1984 stretches, which the review identifies as the film's most effective — increasingly resembling a thriller about walls closing in on the family, especially once Ella realizes the cult's anti-healthcare policy could prove disastrous for her diabetic sister. Tracy Letts, stunt-cast as Coon's husband in the 1982 sequences, is missed when the film shifts forward.

The one weak link, per the review, is James as the cult leader. She "fails to convince as an emotionally manipulative figure who could bring women her senior under her spell." James replaced Vicky Krieps, whose offbeat energy the reviewer sees as better suited to menace. Through James's leadership, the cult becomes "a cult of no personality."

Where does this leave Nattiv?

The review situates the film within the director's career. His 2018 short Skin — about a white supremacist kidnapped and tattooed jet-black as revenge for a hate crime — won an Oscar in a year dominated by Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody, and the reviewer calls it "the most-embarrassing Oscar winner" of that ceremony.

The closing judgment: The Liberation is Nattiv's strongest effort to date, but "that's not saying much." The credit belongs to an "almost uniformly excellent ensemble elevating his material," while the director "remains as clumsy as ever in transforming his stories into incisive social commentary."

The film comes across, in the reviewer's phrase, like "a too-polished Martha Marcy May Marlene" — a marker of how far the ensemble carries it, and how far the direction falls short.