Fabianne Therese has spent fifteen years being the friend in other people's horror films, and when Dolly gave her the lead she played terror as tiredness rather than noise. It is a real instinct, still waiting for a part that gives it room.
Fi1m perspective
The best stretches of Dolly (2026) are the ones in which nothing happens. Macy and Max the Impaler stand in the woods and look at each other, and Fabianne Therese does not scream. She sags. The fear in her face is the fear of someone who has been running for hours and knows the running is not over, and it is a far more useful thing for a slasher to have than a shriek. We sat forward in those scenes, and we were aware that her stillness was doing half the work; then the film went back to saying its one thing about motherhood and we sat back again.
She was a runner before she was an actor, and it shows in the way she plays exhaustion as something the body does rather than something the face announces. That instinct has been sitting in supporting parts for a long time. She started in 2011 with a web series and a run of independent genre films: Amy in Don Coscarelli's John Dies at the End (2012), The Aggression Scale the same year, Erin in Starry Eyes (2014), Sadie in the anthology Southbound (2015), Jules Rae in Teenage Cocktail (2016). We have not reviewed them, and will not pretend to a view of them here. Her own account of the period is plainer than any critic's: she has said she has played "the best friend or these other side characters that you don't really get to spend a lot of time developing." That is the career until Dolly, in one sentence.
What Dolly shows is that she can carry a horror film when it lets her. What it also shows is the limit. Rod Blackhurst gives her grain, woods and a monster worth looking at, and he gives her Macy, who is a part rather than a character: a woman defined by what is chasing her and by very little else. Therese fills the gaps with weariness, and weariness can only do so much. There is no moment where Macy decides something, or wants something other than to live, and so there is no moment where the performance gets to be more than well-judged endurance.
She also directs short films, described on her own site as surreal and nostalgic, which suggests she has an eye of her own, though we cannot judge it from here. The screen work so far is a single quality, underplaying, applied to parts that mostly did not ask for it. That quality is worth a writer's attention.
See Dolly for the scenes where two people wait to see who moves first. The film around them is not the reason to go, and we scored it accordingly. What we would like next is a horror film in which she is frightened of something and also wants something, so that we can find out whether the tiredness is a choice or the only note she has.
Biography
Fabianne Therese Gstottenmayr is an American actress and director. She was born on 20 August 1988 in Kansas City, Missouri. Her family moved frequently during her childhood, living in Austria, Sri Lanka, Abu Dhabi and Palm Springs. She initially trained as a track runner before turning to acting.
Therese is known for roles in independent films including John Dies at the End (2012) as Amy, The Aggression Scale (2012) as Lauren, Starry Eyes (2014) as Erin, Southbound (2015) as Sadie and Teenage Cocktail (2016) as Jules Rae. She played Macy in the 2025 horror film Dolly. She has also directed and written short films, including Earth is a Paradise (2018). She is a great-great-granddaughter of Ceylonese newspaper editor and activist Armand de Souza.
