Rita Cooper has survived the Holocaust, raised two daughters, kept a marriage intact, held down a bank job, and still cannot explain why getting out of bed feels impossible. Carrie Coon plays that contradiction without turning it into a mystery requiring a neat diagnosis. Rita simply carries too much history inside a life that everyone around her has learned to call stable.
Guy Nattiv’s The Liberation, co-written with Noa Berman Herzberg and inspired by Nattiv’s grandmother, places Rita in early-1980s New Jersey, where stability has become another demand made of her. Reuben (Tracy Letts) is a decent husband. Ella (Bella Ramsey) and Jo (Odessa Young) are loving daughters. Rita has steady work as an assistant bank manager and cares for an elderly father whose mind is deteriorating. None of these things relieve the exhaustion visible in the way Coon lowers herself onto the edge of the bed each morning.
The most brutal evidence arrives when Rita agrees to record her Holocaust testimony. Nattiv shoots the interview through rough VHS imagery, stripping away the polish surrounding much of the film. Rita tries to speak about what happened to her family and crumples into a panic attack before language can catch up with memory. It is an important distinction. Rita has survived history without acquiring the ability to narrate it.
Then Ricki (Lily James) walks into her bank carrying cash and an instinct for exposed nerves. She tells Rita she carries a great deal of “weight.” Rita answers with a joke about metabolism. Ricki means something else entirely.
Two Versions of Rita
The film refuses to show Rita’s recruitment as a clean descent from respectable suburbia into obvious madness. Nattiv and editors Sabine Hoffman and Yuval Orr cut between her life before Ricki and the period after Rita has left home, renamed herself Naia, and settled inside a remote female commune. The chronology briefly disorients, sometimes relying on Coon’s hair and physical condition to establish where the story has landed.
That disorientation serves Rita better than it serves the plot. Cult narratives frequently arrange themselves around hindsight. The viewer sees each warning sign because the genre has already announced the destination. The Liberation weakens that comfort by presenting two versions of Rita almost simultaneously. One woman chain-smokes, takes pills, struggles through work, and looks permanently braced for impact. The other smiles softly, eats sparse meals, speaks the language Ricki has given her, and insists she has finally found peace. The question becomes less “How did this happen?” than “What did the change feel like from inside?”
Ricki’s answer is seductive because it initially contains things Rita genuinely needs. She invites her to watch the sunset on the beach. Rita meets women who dance together, sit around fires, swim naked, take psychedelic mushrooms, and speak about pain without the clinical distance Rita encounters elsewhere. During one gathering, the rigid bank manager begins moving with the group and discovers that being watched can feel different from being evaluated.
Reuben initially sees the benefit. Rita is lighter around Ricki. She laughs. She goes roller-skating for her birthday. The problem enters through accumulation. Ricki starts occupying family space, then emotional space, then marital space. When Reuben finally demands distance, Rita experiences his boundary as another attempt to return her to the life from which she has begun escaping.
Her haircut and adoption of the name Naia could have been blunt symbols of indoctrination. Coon keeps them from becoming theatrical. Rita does not appear possessed by some newly manufactured personality. She looks relieved to stop carrying the old one.
Ricki’s Version of Freedom
Popular culture tends to flatter audiences when depicting cults. Leaders are monsters, followers are fools, and everyone watching gets to enjoy the comfortable fantasy that manipulation announces itself with robes, chanting, and obvious lunacy. Ricki is frightening because her methods resemble forms of intimacy respectable society already rewards. She listens.
She recognizes Rita’s exhaustion within minutes of meeting her. She creates spaces where women touch, dance, talk, swim, and temporarily suspend the identities waiting for them at home. For Rita, whose existence has been divided between survivor, employee, daughter, wife, mother, and caretaker, Ricki offers the radical luxury of being a person without an assigned function.
Dascha Dauenhauer’s score turns that pressure into sound. A recurring ticking rhythm accompanies Rita’s suburban routine, giving ordinary domestic life the quality of a countdown. Around Ricki, the clock recedes. The manipulation works because relief arrives before control.
James is strongest once Ricki no longer needs to seduce anyone. At the commune, she barely raises her voice. She frames obedience as care and suspicion as spiritual weakness. When Ella and Jo arrive, Ricki can threaten their position while maintaining the measured expression of someone discussing wellness over herbal tea. Her authority has become casual, which makes it harder to fight.
The earlier Ricki is less persuasive. James has confidence, a wary smile, and an ability to make silence feel calculated, yet several scenes depend heavily on Coon to supply the attraction the screenplay wants between them. Beach evenings and the roller-skating celebration show Rita having fun, though Ricki herself does not always generate the warmth that would explain such complete trust.
Their relationship carries another uncertainty. During a psychedelic experience, Rita appears to share a sexual encounter with Ricki, or imagines one. Later, she receives unusual access to Ricki’s private boathouse. The film leaves sexual desire suspended between implication and hallucination. Ambiguity suits a relationship built on unstable boundaries, though here it also leaves one source of Rita’s attachment curiously underdeveloped.
The Damage Left Behind
Coon’s performance refuses the easiest interpretation of Rita: that trauma has made her weak. Her acting suggests something harsher. Trauma has trained Rita to function while suffering, which means nobody notices the scale of the suffering until someone learns how to exploit it.
Watch her shoulders before Ricki enters her life. They seem dragged downward before each conversation has begun. Then notice the small, almost embarrassed smiles after their earliest meetings. Rita reacts to pleasure like someone caught violating a rule. Later, at the commune, Coon replaces strain with stillness. Naia speaks calmly while allowing Ricki to make decisions that Rita once would have made herself.
The VHS testimony sits at the opposite end of that spectrum. Rita’s panic arrives physically before any dramatic speech can organize it. Breath collapses, the body folds, and the historical event that other people want preserved as testimony becomes unbearable present tense. Nattiv’s sharpest cultural observation sits there: society praises survivors for remembering, while remaining poorly equipped for the human cost of asking them to remember on command.
Ella sees the transformation from the other direction. Ramsey plays her as angry because fear has already exhausted every gentler option. She and Jo trace their mother to the commune after Rita inadvertently reveals its location in a birthday card, then enter a world where everyone speaks about freedom while Rita appears thinner, isolated, and astonishingly compliant.
Ramsey’s face becomes an argument against Ricki’s vocabulary. During conversations where Rita insists she has found happiness, Ella keeps registering what the language is trying to conceal. She is not impressed by spiritual reinvention because she remembers who had to absorb the consequences of it.
Young gives Jo a softer position at first. She is less immediately combative, leaving Ricki room to redirect attention toward her. Letts, meanwhile, makes Reuben’s earlier tolerance painful in retrospect. He once supported Rita finding new friends because the alternative was watching her disappear inside the house. By the time he realizes that Ricki is reorganizing his marriage, opposition can already be presented to Rita as proof that he never understood her.
When Healing Becomes Authority
The daughters’ arrival changes the film’s grammar. What had been a psychological drama increasingly adopts the machinery of a thriller, with Ella and Jo living inside the commune while pretending to respect the very arrangement they intend to break.
Ricki’s interest in Jo immediately shifts the balance. The possibility that recruitment can reproduce itself across generations exposes the uglier logic beneath all the talk of sisterhood. Rita entered because Ricki saw an abandoned part of her. Jo becomes dangerous to Ricki for the same reason: she is another person who can be isolated, interpreted, then told that interpretation is love.
The film pushes this idea into physical danger through Jo’s diabetes. Ricki’s suspicion of conventional medicine stops being lifestyle eccentricity once Jo requires real treatment. Her belief in natural healing becomes authority over somebody else’s body, and the commune’s language of liberation reveals its ugliest privilege: Ricki alone decides which suffering counts as real.
The sequence finally gives Ella’s hostility a practical target. Ramsey turns panic into action as she tries to get Jo out and reach a hospital, while Rita remains caught between maternal instinct and the belief system that has taught her to distrust the world beyond the gates. The tension is potent because Rita’s conditioning has already been established through dozens of quieter concessions.
Jo’s path into the emergency is less convincing. Certain decisions feel arranged to produce the crisis, making the screenplay briefly visible behind the characters. The switch into overt thriller mode carries the same strain. Ricki becomes materially dangerous very late, after much of the preceding drama has treated danger as emotional and ideological.
Tudor Vladimir Panduru and Fabian Gamper give the transition a tactile continuity. Their grainy cinematography keeps the early 1980s from becoming decorative nostalgia, favoring faded blues, browns, soft beach light, and close framing around Rita’s increasingly distant gaze. Brian Kane’s production design has the same restraint. The bank, suburban house, roller rink, and commune feel inhabited rather than assembled from a checklist of period signifiers.
At the commune’s bonfire, women circle the flames while Dauenhauer’s music and the editing accelerate the ritual into something between ecstasy and alarm. Rita is surrounded by bodies moving in apparent freedom, yet the freedom exists inside Ricki’s closed system, under her gaze, according to her rules. The flames keep rising while everyone dances.
The Liberation premiered at the 53rd Telluride Film Festival on September 4, 2026, ahead of its upcoming theatrical release by Bleecker Street. Set in the 1980s, the drama follows a mother who leaves her family behind to join an isolated female commune, triggering a tense family confrontation when her daughters track her down.
Where to Watch The Liberation (2026) Online
Full Credits
Title: The Liberation
Distributor: Bleecker Street
Release date: September 4, 2026 (Telluride Film Festival)
Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes
Director: Guy Nattiv
Writers: Guy Nattiv, Noa Berman-Herzberg
Producers and Executive Producers: Julia Lebedev, Eddie Vaisman, Oren Moverman, Guy Nattiv, Jaime Ray Newman, Steven Schneider, Roy Lee
Cast: Carrie Coon, Bella Ramsey, Odessa Young, Lily James, Siobhan Williams, Sharon Taylor, John Cassini, Tracy Letts
Composer: Dascha Dauenhauer
The Review
The Liberation
The Liberation treats cult recruitment as an exploitation of recognizable human needs rather than a spectacle of irrationality. Carrie Coon makes Rita’s surrender painfully legible, especially when the woman who once collapses during a Holocaust testimony later accepts Ricki’s language as a substitute for healing. Guy Nattiv’s nonlinear structure occasionally delays momentum, while the late medical crisis pushes the drama toward conventional thriller territory. Yet the film’s sharpest idea survives those weaknesses: liberation can become another vocabulary for control when someone else gets to define what freedom means.
PROS
- Carrie Coon’s extraordinary transformation
- Ramsey’s furious, grounded Ella
- Thoughtful portrayal of cult vulnerability
- Textured early-1980s cinematography
- Strong sound and period design
CONS
- Uneven early Ricki characterization
- Some structural drag
- Jo’s crisis feels mechanically arranged
- Abrupt thriller shift
