Georgie Farmer

Start with the face, because in LifeHack (2026) there is nothing else to look at. Kyle Peters spends the whole film in a video window, talking faster than anyone else in the call and doing his best to look as though none of it matters. What Farmer does is let the panic leak through the boredom, a flicker at a time. The screenlife format gives an actor nowhere to hide and nowhere to move, and he is one of the few in the cast who turns that into an advantage.

He has been at this since he was a child. There was a main role as Jake Crossley in The Evermoor Chronicles (2014), a walk-on in Ready Player One (2018), and then Ajax Petropolus in Wednesday (2022), the gorgon student who hides his snakes under a beanie and hangs about the edges of a show built entirely around Jenna Ortega. Our review found the school mystery less distinctive than its heroine and did not stop to single him out. That is fair to the series and a little unfair to him: a boy who is anxious about his own hair is a good running joke, and he plays it straight, which is the only way it works.

Ronan Corrigan's first feature is the first time he has been asked to carry something, and he carries it as far as the script lets him. Our complaint about the film was pace, not people. We were more anxious for Kyle than a heist conducted in browser tabs had any right to make us, and the cause was his face, which keeps trying to look unbothered and keeps failing in ways the character does not notice. His scenes with Yasmin Finney, played out in typing and deleting, are the best thing in the film. Finney does stillness; Farmer does the opposite, and the two of them in adjacent windows make a better argument for the format than the heist does.

Two parts, one of them a boy who will not take his hat off, are not yet a body of work. Of Ajax's second season he has said, "This season, I really wanted him to grow more confident in himself; to use his snakes as an asset rather than fear them." That is the right instinct. What we would like to see next is a part in which he is not frightened at all, if only to find out whether the nerves are the character or the actor.