Chase Infiniti Talks Toxic Romance Drama "The Julia Set" at TIFF

Chase Infiniti’s follow-up to “One Battle After Another” arrived at the Toronto International Film Festival this month with “The Julia Set,” a campus drama that casts the rising actress as a first-year math prodigy navigating a toxic entanglement with a teaching assistant.

Infiniti plays Julia, whose intellectual gifts draw the attention of Pascal, played by “The Summer I Turned Pretty” star Christopher Briney, the son of a prominent mathematician portrayed by Jason Isaacs. Their connection deepens as Pascal pulls Julia into a competitive circle of students preparing for a math tournament, and what begins as mutual admiration curdles into something closer to control. Director Niki Byrne, making her feature debut, builds the film around the widening gap between Julia’s outward composure and the pressure building underneath it.

Infiniti said the role rattled her more for its subject matter than its technical demands, given a personal history with mathematics that fell well short of prodigy status. She described leaning on her castmates and the script itself rather than any real facility with the material to make Julia’s brilliance believable on screen. Critics who caught the film’s world premiere singled out her performance for its restraint, noting how much of Julia’s inner conflict comes through in what she withholds rather than what she says aloud.

The film marks Infiniti’s first appearance at a film festival, arriving less than a year after “One Battle After Another” turned her into one of the industry’s most closely watched new talents. That role, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Paul Thomas Anderson’s drama, earned her BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations along with a National Board of Review award for breakthrough performance, even as she missed out on an Oscar nomination. The attention has carried into unexpected corners of pop culture, including a turn in K-pop group Ateez’s music video for “BAD,” a role that grew out of her years running a K-pop dance cover crew as a devoted fan of the band.

The cast of “The Julia Set” also includes Nina Hoss, Carmen Ejogo, Chloe Bailey, Gillian Anderson and Nico Hiraga. The film had its world premiere at TIFF, with distribution plans still to be announced.