By Josh Bate
There are few young actors working today with an upward trajectory as vertical as Chase Infiniti’s. After announcing herself with a career-making performance in last year’s Academy Award-winning One Battle After Another, Infiniti once again demonstrates why she is rapidly becoming one of the most compelling and sought-after performers of her generation in The Julia Set. Making its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Niki Byrne’s feature debut gives Infiniti a deceptively restrained role that demands as much from what she withholds as what she expresses. Quiet, observant, and extraordinarily assured, Infiniti turns Julia’s internal struggle into the film’s beating heart, anchoring a thoughtful and deeply resonant story about genius, self-erasure, and the courage required to let oneself be seen.
In The Julia Set, Infiniti plays Julia, a gifted university mathematics student whose exceptional abilities earn her an invitation to join a select group of prodigies preparing for the Putnam Exam, one of the most competitive mathematics competitions. As she navigates the punishing academic pressures surrounding the competition, Julia begins a romance with Pascal (Christopher Briney), her teaching assistant and fellow mathematics student. At the same time, the demands of her burgeoning relationship place increasing strain on her friendship with her best friend, played by Chloe Bailey. What initially appears to be a potentially provocative story about a student and her T.A. gradually reveals itself to be something far more introspective, with Byrne using Julia’s academic environment to explore the complicated ways people learn to diminish themselves.
The central tension of The Julia Set lies in the contradiction between Julia’s extraordinary intellect and her almost instinctive refusal to acknowledge it. She possesses mathematical abilities far beyond her years, yet carries herself with an almost conspicuous modesty, routinely suppressing answers she already knows rather than risk drawing attention to herself. Julia has not merely learned to be humble, but to make herself smaller.
Byrne approaches this idea with considerably more subtlety than the film’s premise might initially suggest. Rather than turning Julia’s romance into a sensationalist examination of an inappropriate student-teacher relationship, The Julia Set is far more interested in the social and psychological forces that convince gifted people, particularly those who enter the world at a disadvantage due to their marginalized identities, that their achievements should be tempered for the comfort of others. Julia’s story becomes an incisive examination of the often-overlooked subtleties of privilege and the ways kindness, excessive humility, and deeply ingrained expectations of self-erasure can cause someone to prioritize everyone around them at the expense of their own ambitions.
Infiniti makes all of this resonate through a performance of remarkable restraint. Julia is not a character who frequently verbalizes the conflict consuming her, meaning Infiniti must communicate enormous amounts through the smallest gestures. There is no monologue explaining what she is feeling; Infiniti simply allows the audience to watch a brilliant young woman actively suppress her own identity.
VERDICT: 7.5/10
Making its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, The Julia Set is an assured feature debut that finds its greatest strength in the contrast between its protagonist’s extraordinary abilities and her reluctance to let the world recognize them. Filmmaker Niki Byrne crafts a thoughtful examination of brilliance, privilege, humility, and the damaging impulse to make oneself smaller, while Gillian Anderson provides a poignant supporting turn that sharpens the film’s central ideas. But it is Chase Infiniti who gives the material its deepest resonance, delivering a remarkably assured performance built almost entirely around what she chooses not to say. Once again demonstrating a rare ability to communicate rich interiority through restraint, Infiniti further cements her status as one of the brightest rising stars the industry has to offer.