Guy Nattiv’s new film The Liberation, screening at the Toronto film festival, turns on a simple but unsettling premise: a woman abandons her family to become part of an insular, all-female commune. The director, an Oscar winner, has said the project is informed by a childhood experience — his grandmother joined a cult and never returned — and the film functions in part as a personal attempt to understand that loss.
Rather than leaning into sensationalist tropes common to many cult stories, Nattiv prefers a measured, slow-burn approach. The film is set in the 1980s and aims for a quieter, more observational tone, resisting the jump-cut shocks and lurid flourishes of schlock horror or some streaming true-crime series. That restraint is intended to probe how and why someone might be drawn away from ordinary life and the ordinary bonds of family.
Carrie Coon, familiar to audiences from projects such as The Leftovers, is cast in the central role and is described as a fitting choice for material that requires psychological nuance. The film’s pacing and emphasis on character over spectacle give Coon room to inhabit the emotional ambiguity of a person who makes such a radical break from her past.
Critics at the Toronto screening have called The Liberation a mostly successful antidote to more sensationalized portrayals of cults, praising its thoughtful tone even as it maintains an undercurrent of unease. For Nattiv, the film serves both as a creative inquiry into a family wound and as a contribution to ongoing cultural fascination with how ordinary lives can be transformed by secretive groups.