Writer/director Sophia Takal again turns her lens on her own craft — and all the people and their perversions within it — with another of her typically attention-clutching thrillers, “Act One.” A quietly watchful Ella Beatty plays a naive but not entirely guileless high schooler and aspiring actress who, after being passed over for a role in the class play, is drawn to a nefarious acting coach (Ari Graynor). What makes the art and craft of acting such fertile ground to explore is that the job is as much tied up in what you do as who you are, where already fuzzy lines come even more disturbingly out of focus.
Hannah (Beatty) is presumably top of her class but largely invisible to her peers in the school hallways, and so an obsession with acting becomes a means of escape into another world. Her mother (Elizabeth Reaser) is hardly invested in Hannah’s actual dreams, and barely notices when her daughter signs up for a local class at Act One Studios. Melanie (Graynor) takes an immediate, special interest in the 17-year-old and the “light” that’s inside her, just one of many declarations that sparkle with a woo-woo, new-agey quality that wouldn’t be out of place coming from a cult leader.
What starts as your typical Meisner-esque curriculum of channeling your own inner experience to project a deeper truth in an imagined setting settles into much more sinister. Our antennae immediately switch up when Hannah starts getting closer to one of her Act One classmates, Henry (Nate Mann), handsome and a little bit older. Hannah starts flunking tests, missing class, and becomes totally subsumed in Melanie’s world and her instructor’s investment in her. A class retreat, before which Hannah’s mother demands to know where her teenage daughter will be sleeping, takes a psychosexual turn involving Hannah, Henry, and Melanie — and with an unsettlingly blocked sexual act that feels straight out of 1996’s coming-of-age thriller “Fear.” And then after the retreat, another even queasier one.
Coming-of-age, too, gets even twistier as Hannah starts to fall deeper under Melanie’s trance, and you wonder what this woman’s intentions really are — is she grooming Hannah? Is she some kind of child sex trafficker? Takal leaves open myriad possibilities in “Act One,” which plays like a moodily paced psychodrama until more conventional thriller elements dislodge the movie from the reality it has established — which isn’t the same thing as the real world, of course, but a late-breaking pivot involving a kidnapping stretches the limits of credulity in terms of just how much Melanie has brainwashed her all her acolytes, not just Hannah.
The most potent moments of “Act One” force you to question whether what you are watching is real, or something out of a scene Melanie has created. (The show she’s lathering her students up into preparing for an imminent stage performance? A play she has written herself, of course.) Tavi Gevinson gets a brief but disquieting appearance as Gracie, one of Melanie’s former proteges who has achieved some success as an actor. Melanie signs Hannah out of school to take her to a matinee of Gracie’s show, and when the two go to Gracie’s dressing room afterward, a spooky scene unfolds that reveals Hannah is one in a line of young women Melanie has psychologically groomed. “Are you her new pet?,” Gracie asks Hannah.
Hannah remains frustratingly oblivious to the red flags popping up all over the place, but we come to understand through the movie’s rhythmic pacing, and exacting framing and editing, that she is nearly too far gone under Melanie’s sway. Beatty, the daughter of Warren and Annette Bening, has few credits to her name, but “Act One” announces the young actress as a serious talent. Graynor, meanwhile, is so charismatic and exudes so much gravitas that, hell, even we start to feel bewitched by her. While the setup is more satisfying than the film‘s more conventionally genre-shaped payoff, Takal ends with a hell of a scene that turns the movie on its head. Hannah may have found her truth, but she’s lost herself in the process, quite literally.
Grade: B+
“Act One” premiered at the 2026 Tribeca Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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