Storm Reid plays teenagers who are not impressed by the adults around them, and she does it without asking to be liked. She has carried one thriller and improved two horror films; the part built around that impatience has not arrived yet.
Fi1m perspective
Daniel Henney's FBI agent in Missing (2023) is a courteous man, and Storm Reid's June treats him like a supply teacher. She is quick, rude to adults and a little too pleased with herself, and Reid plays all of that without asking to be liked, which is why we do like her. That is the habit. Sister Debra in The Nun II (2023) is the sceptic sent along to ask awkward questions, and Reid makes her funny and slightly rude, more of which that film could have used. Even in The Invisible Man (2020), where Sydney watches everything and says almost nothing, the silence looks like a teenager withholding judgement rather than lacking one.
She has been working since childhood. Her feature debut was Emily in 12 Years a Slave (2013), and Ava DuVernay gave her a lead five years later as Meg Murry in A Wrinkle in Time (2018), a girl who begins by doubting herself and has to stop. DuVernay used her again as Lisa in When They See Us (2019); the same year she began as Gia Bennett in Euphoria (2019–2022) and appeared opposite David Oyelowo in Don't Let Go (2019). Then came the run we know best: The Invisible Man, Missing, The Nun II, and a single episode of The Last of Us (2023) as Riley Abel. She has been cast, over and over, as somebody's daughter or younger sister. Nobody has yet made her anyone's boss.
Missing is the one to start with. Will Merrick and Nicholas D. Johnson keep the whole film on screens, so for long stretches Reid is a face in a webcam window with nowhere to hide, and she is better at finding a missing mother than the agency paid to do it. The film knows that is ridiculous and lets her be smug about it. Her scenes with Joaquim de Almeida's Javi, a stranger in Cartagena hired through an app to go and look at a hotel, moved us more than anything the twists managed afterwards, and most of that was Reid, listening hard to a man on a phone held at arm's length. When the script starts spending its plausibility in the last stretch, she is what keeps it upright.
Elsewhere she is the one asking the questions in somebody else's film. Leigh Whannell has the sense to let Sydney watch, since The Invisible Man is about who believes Elisabeth Moss, and a daughter who says little and misses nothing is the witness it needs. Michael Chaves is less careful: The Nun II sets Debra up as the voice of doubt and then mislays her in a middle stretch that repeats one scare in different rooms. Reid has said: "I try to pick projects that have a purpose behind them, that can be impactful, that evoke a conversation or teach people about something." Two horror films and a laptop thriller are an odd fit for that, and they are also where she has been most useful.
The next director to cast her should write the rudeness in on purpose. She has spent three films smuggling it into parts that only asked her to be worried.
Biography
Storm Reid is an American actress. She was born on 1 July 2003 in Atlanta, Georgia, and began her career with early roles in television and film.
Reid made her feature debut in 12 Years a Slave (2013). She played Meg Murry in A Wrinkle in Time (2018) and has appeared in The Invisible Man (2020), The Suicide Squad (2021), Missing (2023) as June and The Nun II (2023) as Sister Debra. On television she has portrayed Gia Bennett in Euphoria and Riley Abel in The Last of Us (2023). She holds a B.A. from the University of Southern California.
