Ryan Kiera Armstrong

In The Old Way (2023) Ryan Kiera Armstrong plays a girl who does not cry, rarely smiles and says the true thing at the wrong moment, and she does it by keeping her face almost entirely still for an hour. Most children on screen are directed to show us what they feel. Armstrong is directed to show us nothing, and she can hold that, which is rarer than it sounds. When the film finally sits her down by a fire with Nicolas Cage and asks her to listen, she has been blank for so long that the smallest movement reads.

We did not expect that scene to move us, and it did. Frederick Wardell holds the two of them in one shot while she asks her father, plainly, whether she is like him, and Cage answers her straight. Armstrong listens the way she has listened all film, and for a few minutes a slack revenge western becomes a picture about what a daughter inherits. We scored the film 49, and that scene is the main reason it was not lower.

The career is the usual one for a child who started early, and it has moved quickly. She began on television as Minnie May Barry in Anne with an E (2017–2019), made her film debut at eight in The Art of Racing in the Rain (2019), and then went through the supporting parts big films keep for children: It Chapter Two (2019), Black Widow (2021), The Tomorrow War (2021). She is often the younger version of a grown woman, or the daughter in a story about her parents. The leads came with Firestarter (2022), where the film was poorly received and some of the notices were unkind to her too, and The Old Way, where she is the best thing in it. Since then she has led Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (2024) and appeared opposite Ethan Hawke in The Lowdown (2025).

What works is the stillness, and what we cannot yet say is what else there is. One good scene in a film we did not much like is a promising thing to have so young, and it is also only one scene. She has said she tries to find herself in every character, "though I can't always agree with a character maybe trying to murder someone else", which is a sensible line from someone whose parts have mostly been written to serve other people's stories. We have not reviewed the films she carries, so we cannot tell you what she does with a whole one.

The interesting stretch is the next one. She has been cast, over and over, as the quiet girl who notices everything, and she is now old enough that the parts will stop being the younger version of someone and start being the person. If the blank face turns out to be a choice and not the only setting, she will be worth following. If it does not, we will find out quickly.