Amber Midthunder

The scene that tells you what Amber Midthunder does comes early in Prey (2022), and almost nothing happens in it. Naru, a young Comanche woman who wants to hunt and is not supposed to, lies in the grass and looks. She watches how the thing she is tracking kills, and what it decides not to kill, and she files it away. Dan Trachtenberg's film is built on the idea that this is her weapon, and Midthunder plays it without a raised voice or a speech. Her face is doing arithmetic.

She had been working for a long time before anyone noticed. A child in New Mexico productions, a first speaking part in Sunshine Cleaning (2008), a move to Los Angeles at seventeen, then the guest-spot circuit: Longmire, Banshee, The Originals. Legion (2017) was the part that established her as a physical performer. She and Bill Irwin play Kerry and Cary Loudermilk, a fighter and a scientist who share one body and argue about whose turn it is, and Midthunder's job is to be the half that hits things while Irwin gets the laughs. She does it with a straight back and no fuss. A run as Rosa Ortecho in Roswell, New Mexico (2019–2022) followed, and then Trachtenberg cast her as Naru.

What she brings is attention, and it is rarer than it sounds. Most action leads are asked to be certain. Midthunder is asked to be wrong and then to learn, and she is good at both. In Prey she loses fights, misreads the ground and gets stuck in a bog, and she never plays these as humiliations, only as information. Dakota Beavers, as her brother Taabe, is the band's real hunter, and their scenes work because she lets him be better than her for most of the film. She trained in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and it shows in how she moves: the axe work looks learned rather than rehearsed. The bog got us. We expected a joke and got a young woman lying in mud working out what she had done wrong, and it moved us more than a scene like that has any right to.

The limits are mostly the limits of what she has been offered. In Legion she is the half of the pair without the comedy, and the nineteen episodes that follow the first eight do not, we thought, know when to stop, which is no fault of hers. The Ice Road (2021), opposite Liam Neeson, and the more recent Novocaine (2025) and Opus (2025) are films we have not reviewed and will not judge here.

The worry is the obvious one. Having found she can carry a film by looking, people may keep asking her to carry films by hitting things. Trachtenberg understood that the fights in Prey mattered because of the looking that came before them. We would like to see her in something where nobody hands her an axe at all.