Nancy is a 2018 thriller about a woman who becomes increasingly convinced she was kidnapped as a child, suspecting she is the daughter of a couple whose child went missing thirty years ago.
There are few movies that I can think of, at least in the last few decades, that had me filled with as many questions at its start than Christina Choe‘s wickedly evocative Nancy. Why does this woman on screen seem so awkward? What is she doing with that website? Why does she lack any emotion? Why is the film framed so small? There are answers of sorts found within this challenging experiment, yet they all slip mostly to the fuzzy edges as we come to find ourselves entrenched in the patterns of a character unlike any we’ve encountered before, brought to distressing life by an actress who not only disappears in the role, but seems wholly consumed by it.
Nancy (Andrea Riseborough) lives what seems a soulless existence, trapped even, in a house with her corrosive mother Betty (Ann Dowd), a woman with Parkinson’s. Nancy is directionless, hoping to be a writer but meets with only rejection, so runs a blog under a false name that spins tales of a baby born and then lost, luring in prey to her deciets, including a mourning man named Jeb (John Leguizamo), who himself lost a daughter (Nancy goes as far as meeting him, disguised as pregnant to tap into his sympathies). However, after her mother suddenly dies, she is left alone with the cat, and soon finds herself drawn to Leo (Steve Buscemi) and Ellen (J. Cameron Smith), parents whose daughter disappeared thirty years ago, and seeing an age-progressed image of what she might look like now, decides that she is in fact, that girl.
Nancy eventually makes contact and even moves in with Leo and Ellen, but to say more would be wrong, the film a mystery that from its start is crafted in the ambiguous, or at least the skeptical. Is Nancy truly what she claims to be? Did she really vacation in North Korea? She does have pictures. We’re constantly questioning her actions, and the way Nancy lifts her eyes and nods her head in reply, well, you can’t help but wonder if she’s telling a lie or completely serious. That’s the real kicker for Nancy, with Riseborough sunken so deeply into what Nancy is, we become convinced of Nancy’s troubling pathos. Riseborough is on a whole other level. It’s a brittle performance.
Choe wrote the screenplay, and Nancy is her feature film debut. What is most affecting about her film is her control, refusing to indulge in much that would seem too tempting for a filmmaker to overdo. As a character, Nancy is a block of pale confusion for the audience, and Choe is careful not to paint that into a corner with hyperbolic displays and manipulations, instead, allowing us to sort of mold our own expectations. You will immediately notice that the movie begins in a small square-framed box, barely taking up half the screen but won’t realize when it shifts to normal, a subtle visual about the confining spaces Nancy exists in at first. She smiles for the first time around 35 minutes in and it’s jarring because she’s been so unmoved to this point, we’ve forgotten what such an expression is.
This is a game of sorts, but Choe isn’t playing by rules we’re familiar with, spinning scenes that are primed for suspense into a moments of revelation. This is made all the more impactful by Smith, who plays a desperate mother finding a powerful sense of closure and just as pressing by Buscemi, as a father not so willing to be fooled, if that is that case. Both Smith and Buscemi are extraordinary.
Nancy is a quiet little film, darkly lit and atmospheric, the outcome of a DNA test weighing on the second half with terrific tension, we wondering how this unusual relationship will evolve and what consequences it will ultimately have. What you think you want and what is offered is not what you might expect, but Nancy never once hopes to fool you. It’s honest and committed. It’s also raw and uncompromising, and by its end, deeply persuasive. Highly-recommended.