Emily Watson can make an unguarded face painful to watch and a polite question frightening. We rate her most when directors trust those small choices, rather than supplying music to tell us how much they matter.
Fi1m perspective
Emily Watson’s Sister Mary smiles through a conversation that becomes harder to sit through with every question. In Tim Mielants’s Small Things Like These (2024), she asks after Bill’s girls and casually lets him hear how much she knows about his family. She never raises her voice. We found ourselves holding our breath because that ordinary politeness made the threat harder to answer.
That control looks different from the exposure of her film debut, Breaking the Waves (1996), but the conviction is there in both. As Bess McNeill, she makes devotion so unguarded that we want to protect her before we have decided what to think of her faith. Lars von Trier asks us to accept too much suffering as proof of love, and Watson’s performance cannot excuse all of it. Robby Müller’s raw cinematography keeps us uncomfortably close to Bess, while Anders Refn’s editing gives the performance time, sometimes more than the film needs. Joachim Holbek’s music adds pressure that her performance scarcely needs.
She followed that debut with Jacqueline du Pré in Hilary and Jackie (1998), learning the cello for the role. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2002) brought a quieter comic part as Lena Leonard, loosening the early association with harrowing drama. She has also worked in television, including Chernobyl (2019), while continuing to take leading and supporting film parts. Sister Mary should discourage anyone from judging her only by how convincingly she suffers.
Hamnet (2025) shows what can get in her way. Her Mary speaks plainly about having buried children of her own, and that plainness is welcome in Chloé Zhao’s film. But Zhao and co-editor Affonso Gonçalves hold the grieving faces after they have told us enough, while Richter’s strings keep pressing for tears. Watson is caught in the same prolonged weeping as the other actors, with too little opportunity to do anything else.
Start with Small Things Like These for how much she can do in one long scene. Try Breaking the Waves when there is room in the evening for its cruelty as well as her tenderness. Do not expect Watson’s performance to settle the doubts about what von Trier puts on screen.
Biography
Emily Watson is an English actress. She began her career on stage and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1992. In 2002 she appeared in productions of Twelfth Night and Uncle Vanya at the Donmar Warehouse, receiving an Olivier Award nomination for the latter.
Watson received Academy Award nominations for Best Actress for her film debut in Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996) and for Hilary and Jackie (1998). Her other film credits include Punch-Drunk Love (2002), Red Dragon (2002), War Horse (2011), The Theory of Everything (2014), Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017), God's Creatures (2022), Small Things Like These (2024) and Hamnet (2025). On television she won the BAFTA Television Award for Best Actress for Appropriate Adult (2011) and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award for Chernobyl (2019). She played Valya Harkonnen in the series Dune: Prophecy (2024).
