Nancy

Saturday 13 October, Cinema 1, 6:10pm

 

Living in obscurity in upstate New York, Nancy is an alienated, goth-haired 30-something who’s fond of concocting twisted outsider fantasies. After the death of her sick and overbearing mother (Hereditary’s Ann Dowd), she sees a television news report about a pair of kind academics whose daughter went missing three decades ago. Deciding that she must have been kidnapped as a child, Nancy pays her potential real parents a visit. Christina Choe’s unnerving, ambiguous first feature is a slow-burn mystery rich in snowy, small-town atmosphere and spiked with flashes of dark humour. Transformed and transfixing, Andrea Riseborough gives an astonishingly controlled performance as the unknowable titular character, while Steve Buscemi and J Smith-Cameron are deeply sympathetic as the grief-stricken couple whose world she upends.