Amiah Miller

In War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) a girl who cannot speak is taken in by apes, and for the rest of the film she watches. Matt Reeves gives Amiah Miller almost nothing to do and she does it. The apes sign more than they speak, and the film has the patience to let a subtitle sit under a stare; hers is the one human face that earns the same patience. Andy Serkis's Caesar is the reason the film works, but the quietest scenes belong to Karin Konoval's Maurice and to Miller's girl, and they moved us more than the rest of the picture did, because nothing in them is said and neither party needs it to be.

It was not her first film. She had already played the young Rebecca in Lights Out (2016), the earlier version of the lead. After Nova came The Water Man (2020), her first substantial speaking part, as one of two children on a quest; then My Best Friend's Exorcism (2022) and Hold Your Breath (2024), a period thriller in which she plays Rose Bellum opposite Sarah Paulson. We have not reviewed those, so we will only note the pattern. She is cast as young people in trouble, in horror, drama and fantasy, and cast for what she can show rather than what she can say.

The Madison (2026) is her first prestige television, Taylor Sheridan's six-part drama about grief, in which Michelle Pfeiffer gives the material more feeling than the script has earned. Miller plays Bridgett Reese, one of the younger Reeses, and with Alaina Pollack she gets the most life of anyone below the top of the bill, mostly by being allowed to be ordinary. That is a compliment with a limit. The adults around her are handed attitudes rather than parts; the young are permitted to behave like people. It asks nothing difficult of her.

Miller has said Nova taught her "how much you can still say without any dialogue and how everything can live in your eyes and in the smallest expressions." That is true, and it is also the whole of what we know about her so far. A silent child holds a screen because we cannot tell what she understands. A grown woman with lines has to do something else, and the films have not yet made her. The 'Burbs (2026), a remake, is next. We would like to see her in something loud, opposite someone who will not stop talking, to find out whether the stillness is a choice or simply what she was asked for. Until then, the stare is what she has, and it is a good one.