The Guardian ·
The Liberation review – Carrie Coon joins all-female cult in unsettling drama
Director Guy Nattiv draws on personal experience for an 80s-set tale of a woman abandoning her family for a creepy commune
We remain fascinated and horrified by the hows and whys of cult narratives, how someone could be so seduced by something so unknown and why they would then risk everything for it. Oscar-winning writer-director Guy Nattiv has been personally affected by these questions for most of his life, his grandmother joining a cult when he was a child and never coming back.
His attempt to try to understand who she was and why she acted in such a way has led to unsettling drama The Liberation, a fictionalised tale that acts as a form of therapy for him and a mostly successful antidote to more sensationalist cult stories for us. Enough Netflix docuseries and schlocky horror movies have given us a more extreme and often violent idea of how cults infect and destroy vulnerable people but Nattiv opts for a more thoughtful slow-burn. He’s recruited a suitably thoughtful actor in Carrie Coon, no stranger to this particular psychology having broken out in The Leftovers, one of the more intelligent cult dramas in recent years.
It’s a rare big-screen lead for Coon, an actor who made a name for herself a little later than most, and she tears into it, working hard to try to bring us into the mindset of someone who would do something so unimaginable. We might never truly understand or even like her all that much but we believe her and like Nattiv, we’re haunted by her actions.
