A selection of the year's most tantalizing performances proves there's still so much to explore.
These actors swing from desire to rage to grief with astonishing fluidity.
These performances slice through their material's depths and hold up innermost truths.
Great performances stretch out the human canvas in unlikely directions and contours. They render possible new gamut of emotional shades, crises and contradictions. The ideal performance unlocks the film as well as opens up fresh avenues of interpretation.
Here are Outlook’s picks for the year’s most electrifying performances. These actors achieved something full-bodied and uncompromising, capable of arcing between emotional extremes within a heartbeat. They pinned you down with the intensity, the degree to which they can surpass. Besides these names, even supporting performances like Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (Sentimental Value), Nina Hoss (Hedda), Stefania Gadda (Sirat) or Mariam Afshari (It Was Just An Accident) made their respective films shiver with bottomless feeling, expanding their presence beyond limited space.
1. Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You)
A mother on the anvil of a breakdown, Rose Byrne’s Linda is a storm, untethered and unwilling to demand sympathies. Linda has to juggle work and being the primary caregiver of her daughter who has an unspecified illness. Byrne underpins and elevates the Mary Bronstein-directed film, hosing all its energy, rage and grief in a single, undiluted stream. An actor wholly allied with her role’s demands, she rejects any shred of vanity and commits wholly to delirious anxiety. Byrne is overwhelming and wrenching as Linda requests her therapist for clarity on what she can do. She’s as agonizing as stressful to watch. Byrne won the Silver Bear for her performance and has been sweeping most critics’ prizes. The Oscar race is mostly split between her and Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley.
2. Lee Byung-hun (No Other Choice)
In Park Chan-wook’s anti-capitalist thriller, the laid-off Man-soo resorts to murderous means to wipe out competition while seeking a new job. Lee Byung-hun revels in the absurdity of the circumstances—Man-soo’s swinging from terror at his own spiralling crimes to the deception that the tasks necessitate. The actor aces physical comedy, which is especially tricky in this film given how Park redraws it vis-à-vis the piling dead bodies. Both actual violence and its lingering threat are shot through with a tight chuckle, the unnerved squirm which Byung-hun has down pat. The character is coiled with awkward hiding. How he blanches his heart, compelled by the survivor’s race, finds a final impassive veil in the performance.
3. Teyana Taylor (One Battle After Another)
As the revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills, Teyana Taylor opens Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another to blazing effect. She’s the film’s engine, capturing its political restlessness like lightning in a bottle. With a radical’s indelible fire that struggles with maternal expectations, Taylor props up the forty-minute prologue but also closes the film. Becoming a mother, Perfidia refuses to slow down, jostling with her new identity. It’s the kind of performance that charges an entire film into motion. One Battle After Another is haunted by her gradual absence and Taylor’s gale-force performance is impossible to shake off.
4. Jennifer Lawrence (Die My Love)
In a career-best performance, Jennifer Lawrence holds together Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love. Buffeted by post-partum depression, Lawrence imbues Grace with a feral edge. She doesn’t mince her words, with Lawrence mining even bouts of humor from desperate, weary exasperation. Grace insists she’s fine while she goes through hell. Lawrence accentuates a portrait of a woman in freefall with absolute fearless commitment. She can go anywhere, be as wild and wanton as imaginable and you believe in every emotional splinter.
5. Tessa Thompson (Hedda)
A deliciously diabolical Tessa Thompson shows that her titular Hedda can control any room’s temperature. In Nia Da Costa’s queer spin on the Ibsen play, Thompson is a startling, sharp vision of autonomy thrusting through social codes. Hedda oozes power as an expert manipulator and is a canny orchestrator of trouble and misunderstandings. All know what an agent of chaos she can be, yet fail to apprehend the trail of destruction she leaves. The film, unfolding over a party night, is a rich, hissing display of dark desires, with Thompson dialing up lethal mischief. Watch how she measures every whisper and curls her hands while Hedda eagerly heaves at an ex-lover’s entrance. The erotic tension she shares with Nina Hoss yields one of the year’s juiciest, utterly irresistible pairings. Together, they deliver a ripe dance of seduction, hurt and resentment.
