Ariane Labed

Labed makes us notice movement before we start looking for a psychological explanation. Her dance background matters to that approach: she is comfortable with physical behaviour that a more naturalistic performance might try to soften. Her screen debut as Marina in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010) established that emphasis. Playing a gymnast in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Alps (2011) continued an early career built around directors who give actors unusual rules to follow.

Lanthimos provides the clearest link between that early work and her English-language films. In The Lobster (2015), Labed plays the Maid within the hotel’s bleakly funny system of compulsory coupledom. This is ensemble work suited to her physical precision and comfort with stylised behaviour. We recommend the film for its satire and awkward tenderness, with a caveat: the plotting grows slack after the sharper hotel section.

Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir (2019), in which she plays Garance, belongs to the later work beyond those early Greek films. Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024) gives us a reason to distinguish the quality of her acting from the material she is handed. We were frustrated by the writing given to Labed, because she performs it well while Corbet explains what his images had already conveyed. Adrien Brody and the assured first half still make the film worth an evening. Labed, too, deserves credit, though we would rather her material had been left unwritten.

Her move into directing makes sense as a continuation of that attention to actors. September Says (2024), her first feature, adapts Daisy Johnson’s novel and brings a choreographed approach to female relationships and rites of passage. Her stated preference for keeping actors whole in the frame, rather than cutting them into close-ups, is a useful practical clue to what interests her. It gives us something specific to look for as her directing develops. We would start with The Lobster for the acting, allowing for a second half less sharp than the first.