Carla Juri's gift is stillness: she stands at the edge of a scene and makes us wonder what she is deciding. English-language films have mostly used her as a watchful supporting face; the leads that made her name are German.
Fi1m perspective
In Six Minutes to Midnight (2020), Carla Juri plays Ilse Keller, a teacher at a school for the daughters of the Nazi elite on the Sussex coast, and she spends most of the film watching the new English master. The film is a chase we have seen before and we scored it 47. Juri is the one thing in it that keeps a question open. Whose side Keller is on is not settled for a good while, and she plays the uncertainty without a flicker, so that we look at her face to find out and it declines to tell us.
That watchfulness is what English-language cinema has mostly asked of her. She was a lead first. Swiss-born and trilingual, she worked in Swiss and German productions from 2006, took a supporting part in 180° (2010) and the lead in Someone Like Me (2012), then played Helen in David Wnendt's Wetlands (2013), the adaptation of the controversial bestseller that made her name. We have not reviewed it. What is said of it, consistently, is that she gave the part a physical and emotional intensity that drew attention well beyond Germany.
Since then the work has split. In German she has carried films: Paula Modersohn-Becker in Christian Schwochow's Paula (2016), Dorothea Kemper in Caroline Link's When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (2019). In English she has been part of ensembles: Brimstone (2016) for Martin Koolhoven, Romola Garai's Amulet (2020), and Dr Ana Stelline in Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 (2017), a film we admired at 83 and in which our review did not pause on her. The part is a small one.
Her method, by her own account, is research and clothes. She has said that costume and setting do much of the work for her, and her preparation has, in one case, run to attending a high school undercover to play a younger character. 'I had to justify every action and reaction. A lot of her nakedness is emotional,' she said of Helen. The risk of that approach is a film tidy enough to absorb it, and Paula has been accused of smoothing a difficult painter into something pleasant. We cannot judge that ourselves. We can say that in Six Minutes to Midnight we were bored by the plot and kept looking at her instead, because she was the only person on screen whose next move we could not predict, and that is a rarer skill than it sounds.
She is still waiting for the English-language film that puts her at the centre of the frame rather than at its edge. In Six Minutes to Midnight she is handed less than anyone else on screen and does more with it, and we would rather have followed Keller out of that school than Miller.
Biography
Carla Juri is a Swiss actress. She was born on 2 January 1985 in Locarno and trained in acting in Los Angeles and London from 2005 to 2010.
She is known for her leading role in Wetlands (2013) and for playing Dr Ana Stelline in Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Other credits include Brimstone (2016), Paula (2016), Morris from America (2016), When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (2019), Six Minutes to Midnight (2020) and Amulet (2020).
Juri received Swiss Film Awards for her performances in 180° (2010) and Someone Like Me (2012). In 2013 she was named a Shooting Star at the Berlin International Film Festival.
