Jack O’Connell and Sandra Hüller attended Variety’s London Film Festival dinner, according to the publication’s coverage. Their presence offers a particularly rewarding starting point for a conversation about acting: both have delivered performances that make an audience reconsider its first judgment of a character.
For O’Connell, Starred Up supplies a bruising example. For Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall offers an equally demanding study in how people interpret behavior. These films belong to different dramatic worlds, but watching them together reveals a shared concern: what happens when someone’s survival depends on being understood by people who already think they know the answer?
The dinner is the occasion for this retrospective; the comparison is a critical reading of their work, rather than a claim about anything discussed at the event.
Spoiler notice: The following analysis discusses central conflicts in both films and the resolution of Anatomy of a Fall.
O’Connell in Starred Up: Aggression as a Survival Habit
David Mackenzie’s Starred Up places O’Connell’s Eric Love, a 19-year-old young offender, in an adult prison where his estranged father, Neville, is already incarcerated. As Tribeca’s synopsis establishes, the transfer brings Eric into a struggle involving prison authority, other inmates, and a father whose protection can be difficult to distinguish from punishment.
O’Connell’s performance makes that premise feel immediate because Eric’s aggression seems to precede conscious decision. His body is always preparing for the next confrontation. He occupies space as though leaving any part of it undefended would invite an attack. The effect is frightening, but it also suggests the exhausting labor of remaining frightening.
From Eric’s perspective, intimidation has practical value. It can interrupt a threat before he has to acknowledge being afraid. The problem is that the same response makes help almost impossible to accept. O’Connell lets that contradiction organize the performance: Eric’s defenses are effective enough to keep using and destructive enough to keep trapping him.
A Father Who Cannot Simply Become a Father
Neville, played by Ben Mendelsohn, complicates Eric’s position. Their relationship brings an intimate history into an institution governed by hierarchy. A paternal instruction can sound like another demand for submission; an attempt at protection can become an assertion of ownership.
What makes their scenes compelling is the mismatch between the relationship they have and the relationship each may want. Biological connection does not supply the habits of trust that an absent parent and an abandoned child lack. Eric cannot simply become receptive because Neville suddenly has something fatherly to say.
My reading is that O’Connell’s strongest work emerges in these unsettled exchanges. His anger carries competing impulses: push the father away, force him to stay, refuse his authority, test whether his concern survives rejection. None requires a speech explaining Eric’s psychology.
Why the Therapy Scenes Matter
The group sessions involving volunteer therapist Oliver, played by Rupert Friend, introduce another possibility: other people might respond to Eric without reproducing his familiar pattern of provocation and retaliation. Listening becomes a dramatic event because he has so little reason to trust it.
For me, these scenes give the film its emotional weight. The violence creates urgency, but the possibility of a different response creates stakes. A viewer begins watching for the brief interval in which Eric might choose something other than escalation.
The film’s relentless pressure can also narrow its emotional range. Some viewers may find the succession of confrontations exhausting. Yet O’Connell gives that exhaustion a purpose: Eric’s behavior feels like a system he cannot easily switch off.
Hüller in Anatomy of a Fall: The Cost of Explaining Yourself
Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall subjects Hüller’s Sandra, a novelist, to a different kind of confinement. After her husband Samuel dies outside their Alpine home, she faces a murder trial. Their visually impaired son, Daniel, must navigate both the evidence and his relationship with his surviving parent.
Hüller makes Sandra’s predicament absorbing without presenting her as an easily decipherable person. She can be direct, irritated, affectionate, defensive, and analytical. Those qualities do not arrive in a convenient order that tells the audience whether to trust her.
That is the performance’s great strength. Sandra has to answer questions about a death while watching other people assign meanings to her marriage. Her tone can become evidence against her before the substance of her answer has been considered.
Where Eric tries to control an encounter through physical threat, Sandra tries to preserve distinctions through language. An unhappy relationship is not a complete explanation of a death. An unpleasant remark does not settle what happened. Yet the trial repeatedly presses complicated experiences into arguments that can be accepted or rejected.
The Argument That Becomes Public Property
The recorded marital argument is the film’s most revealing collision of private experience and public interpretation. Sandra tells Samuel, “You’re not a victim.” Later comes the sharper accusation: “Your generosity conceals something dirtier and meaner.” Together, the lines expose a dispute over who gets to describe sacrifice.
Hüller gives the confrontation the force of someone resisting a story in which another person’s disappointment has become her responsibility. That does not make everything Sandra says fair. Her insight can wound, and her certainty can feel merciless. The scene works because emotional accuracy and emotional cruelty can coexist.
Once the recording enters the courtroom, the argument acquires a new function. Words spoken inside an ongoing relationship become fragments used to explain its ending. The audience encounters the same temptation as the court: treating a vivid piece of evidence as though vividness guarantees completeness.
Daniel Changes What a Verdict Can Mean
Daniel’s position gives Anatomy of a Fall its deepest emotional difficulty. He is a child trying to understand his parents while adults ask him to contribute to a judgment about them. Whatever the legal outcome, he must continue living with the interpretation he accepts.
Sandra’s acquittal resolves the prosecution. It cannot restore the family’s earlier life or provide the audience with direct access to the fatal moment. I find that separation essential to the film’s power: legal closure and emotional certainty are different experiences.
Hüller’s restraint helps preserve that distinction. Sandra does not become transparent merely because the proceedings end. The character remains a person whose inner life exceeds the account others have assembled.
What These Performances Bring to the Festival Conversation
Seeing O’Connell and Hüller named together in London invites a useful comparison without suggesting their methods are identical. His Eric often externalizes danger; her Sandra struggles over how danger is interpreted. Both performances make family relationships inseparable from the institutions surrounding them.
That concern also runs through our analysis of private desire and public persecution in The Devils, where authority turns intimate experience into an instrument of judgment. The films differ enormously, but each asks viewers to examine who controls the story being told about another person.
Festival appearances create a separate kind of public image, as our commentary on Jenna Ortega’s Rome Film Festival appearance explores. Here, the most rewarding response to the dinner news is to return to the performances themselves.
My judgment is that Starred Up and Anatomy of a Fall make an unusually revealing double feature. Eric needs room to become more than his violence; Sandra needs room to exist beyond a persuasive account of her marriage. O’Connell and Hüller make that room visible. Their characters remain troubling, sometimes difficult company, but the films ask us to keep paying attention after an easy judgment would let us stop.
Original content by this site's editorial team. Published: October 18, 2026 at 11:04:33 PDT (Los Angeles time)
