Carrie Coon as Rita in The Liberation. Photograph: Bleecker Street View image in fullscreen Carrie Coon as Rita in The Liberation. Photograph: Bleecker Street First look review Toronto film festival 2026 Review The Liberation review – Carrie Coon joins all-female cult in unsettling drama Toronto film festival: Director Guy Nattiv draws on personal experience for an 80s-set tale of a woman abandoning her family for a creepy commune
Benjamin Lee in Toronto Wed 16 Sep 2026 20.22 CEST Last modified on Wed 16 Sep 2026 21.12 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google W e 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.
Read more 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.
Like his grandmother, the character is called Rita, a wife, mother and assistant bank manager living in early 80s New Jersey. Her life is small and undeniably average but not unhappy, her husband (played warmly by Coon’s real-life spouse Tracy Letts) is loving and she is close to her two daughters (played by Odessa Young and a tenacious Bella Ramsey). But Rita has a past that won’t let her fully relax into her life: she grew up in Poland and endured the horrors of the Holocaust, her family taken from her at a young age. Like the most susceptible of us, she’s an open wound, something quickly realised by the charismatic, raven-haired Ricky (Lily James), who invites her to join a group of friends at the beach. Rita is baffled by the offer and by Ricky in general but also flattered, an attractive younger woman suddenly flooding her with attention and compliments.
The film flips back and forth between the gradual, awful grooming process as Rita spends more and more time with Ricky’s heart-over-head all-female troupe, dancing and appreciating nature, and then much later when her concerned daughters track her down to a remote compound. I don’t know if the timeline-switching really adds all that much, a common complaint at the moment, but it’s less distractingly gimmicky and more inconsequential.
The cult is very much rooted in its time, those who believe in nature and love and spirituality rallying against the gluttony of overconsumption as the 70s starts to give way to a decade of greed and excess, but it’s also one that fe…