Ezra Miller

In We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), the teenage Kevin looks at his mother and gives her nothing. Lynne Ramsay lets the shot run, Tilda Swinton does the flinching, and Miller does not move. It is unsettling, and the tension between the two of them held us even where the script narrowed the boy into a monster and left us little reason to wonder whether Eva was being fair. That is the Miller we first came to know: a teenager whose inner life has to be read off the gaze, because the mouth is not going to help.

The career before that was opera, from the age of six, and a first film, Afterschool (2008), at sixteen. Then two films a year apart that made the reputation and pulled in opposite directions. Kevin is cold. Patrick in The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) is warm, funny and loud, and what makes the part more than a service role is that the confidence seems to take effort to keep up. The pleasure Miller, Logan Lerman and Emma Watson take in one another is the strongest reason to keep watching, and even when the writing sounds prepared the affection does not. The worry at the time, and it was a reasonable one, was that Miller would spend a decade playing intense outsider teenagers. The franchises settled that.

Credence Barebone in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) began three films under David Yates, and Barry Allen began the same year, arriving at a solo film in The Flash (2023). We scored that film 50 and we still think the first hour is worth an evening, mostly because of Miller. The older Barry keeps his hands in his pockets and talks fast to get the talking over with; the younger one sprawls and is delighted by everything, himself included. Paul Machliss and Jason Ballantine cut the two of them like a sitcom, holding on the face that has just been insulted, and it works.

The scene we did not expect to remember is quieter. Barry stands in a kitchen with his mother, Maribel Verdú, who plays Nora plainly and has not yet noticed the time, and Miller stops twitching entirely. We were moved, more than we thought a film that opens with a collapsing hospital could manage, and the reason is that Benjamin Wallfisch's score does almost nothing and Miller does less. It is the Kevin stillness put to the opposite use.

So the pattern is fairly clear. Miller is best opposite an actor who will not fill the silence, Swinton or Verdú, and in the hands of a director who trusts a held shot. Give the character something to do with the body, a run to teach or a joke to land, and the result is likeable and busy. Take it away and something harder to name comes through. The second half of The Flash forgot whose story it was telling, and it forgot that too.