Sarah Adina Smith

The friendship between the characters played by Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (2026) remains convincing when the mood darkens. Smith and fellow director Owen Harris keep the actors central to this small-scale fantasy. We warmed to the pair because testing their decency never makes their affection seem foolish. This is the strongest reason to seek out Smith’s work: she can make people worth spending time with, even when the story around them is thin.

Her debut feature, The Midnight Swim (2014), explored family psychology and mysticism; Buster’s Mal Heart (2016) pursued faith and mental unravelling. Smith wrote, directed and edited both. Birds of Paradise (2021), which she also wrote and directed, used dance to examine control and perfection. On television, she directed the pilot and another episode of Hanna (2019). Her work on the first two episodes of Lessons in Chemistry (2023) drew on her strength with intimate scenes between actors, a useful quality when establishing characters whom other directors will take over.

Her television work also includes Little House on the Prairie (2026), and our enthusiasm is more limited there. Rebecca Sonnenshine’s eight-part series is handsome and gentle, but too clean and tidy to be much more than pleasant. That is a judgement about the whole programme, not a fault we can assign to Smith alone. It does, however, show why a careful approach is not enough if so little is allowed to feel awkward or untidy.

Neither Smith nor Harris can make the thin story in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms disappear, and the coarse humour sometimes makes its company less appealing. Their handling of the central relationship keeps us interested, although some of the early pleasure diminishes as the mood darkens. Start there for Claffey and Ansell, provided toilet humour is not a disqualification.