Kathryn Newton

In Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023), Kathryn Newton's Cassie Lang is the daughter who grew up while her father was away, and roughly every twenty minutes she stops the film to tell him what he ought to have learned. Newton is not to blame for the lines. She says them as written, plainly and with a straight back, and that is the trouble, because a moral put that clearly can only ever sound like a moral. She has been working since she was four, on All My Children and then Gary Unmarried, and she has the professional's habit of being exactly where the scene needs her. What the films we have reviewed have not yet given her is a reason to be there beyond that.

The career divides neatly. A teenage lead in Paranormal Activity 4 (2012) at fifteen, then a run of grown-up ensembles: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Lady Bird (both 2017), and the regular part of Abigail Carlson in Big Little Lies (2017–2019), where she held her place in scenes with far more established actors. Then the turn back to horror and horror-comedy: Freaky (2020), the body-swap film with Christopher Landon, who has directed her twice; Lisa Frankenstein and Abigail (both 2024). Somewhere along the way she picked up the "scream queen" label, which is meant kindly and is not quite a compliment. It describes the genre she keeps being asked to save rather than anything she does inside it.

The physical work is the part of her reputation that seems best earned, and Freaky did most to earn it; we have not reviewed it and will not pretend to. What we can speak to is Abigail, where Radio Silence hand the picture to Dan Stevens and to Alisha Weir's small monster and leave Newton's Sammy standing near the bursting bodies. We kept waiting for the film to turn to her, and it never did; we came out remembering Weir and Stevens and having to check the cast list for the rest. She is fine in it. Fine is what the part allows.

That is the pattern across everything of hers we have seen: a capable, likeable actor whom directors trust to hold the sensible end of a scene while the louder performers have the fun. Directors find that useful. It does not, on its own, make anybody a lead. Newton has said that being a Marvel superhero was one of the biggest goals of her career, and that she "would do it forever if I could", which is her right. But the Cassie of Quantumania is written as someone's daughter, and the films that will tell us what she can do are the ones where she is the person the story is about. Landon has cast her that way once. We would like to see who does it next.