TIFF Review: Chase Infiniti in The Julia Set

Chase Infiniti follows her breakout performance in One Battle After Another with a starring role in The Julia Set, which is basically Good Will Hunting for girls. Infiniti stars as Julia, a brilliant math student at a fake college dubbed GCU. Her mother (Carmen Ejogo) is obsessed with Julia transferring to MIT, though why she should do that is vague. It seems to be only because Julia’s mom has never heard of another school. Also, her mom doesn’t understand her math genius but still has strong opinions on the school Julia goes to? The school/mom either needed to be much simpler or the point of the whole film, because it is confusing, as is.

Director Niki Byrne’s actual concept is relatively simple—Julia is book smart but people dumb, and this makes her easy prey for Pascal, a smarmy math TA (played with appropriate sleaze by The Summer I Turned Pretty star Christopher Briney). The problem is that Julia is SO people dumb, it’s like she’s never been outside one day in her life. Julia has never seen a red flag in her life; she has no interpersonal radar or conflict meter. Pascal is so obviously a loser, and out to destroy Julia’s potential – and she overlooks every warning sign flashing directly in her eyes. She’s like Bambi staggering directly into the path of the hunter’s gun.

‘But Sarah,’ you may say, ‘this sounds very harsh. Sometimes very smart people aren’t the most street smart; that’s a believable premise.’ Yes! It is! But Julia’s lack of street smarts is so overplayed it becomes redundant and then intolerable. It doesn’t help that she’s a remote character with almost no interiority. Almost everything we learn about her is said by other people. What we see of Julia is pretty much just her blazing past the aforementioned red flags to advance her relationship with the odious Pascal, which is why she comes across as such a bungled character.

Byrne, aided by cinematographer Antonio Calvache, does love to frame Julia as either one of few women, or often the only woman, in a space. In a roomful of students dominated by men like Pascal, Julia stands out because she is a double minority, a Black woman. This is one of the film’s strongest elements, as is a sequence in which Julia goes to visit Pascal’s family home. There we meet Pascal’s parents: father Aleksander (Jason Isaacs at his sneering best), and mother Anne (Gillian Anderson at her c-ntiest). Aleksander is also a brilliant mathematician, and Anne was once his student, and he obviously stunted Anne’s mathematic development. The family scenes are deeply uncomfortable, not only for the way Aleksander and Anne snipe at one another—and turn their talons on Julia and Pascal—but also for the subtext of Pascal replicating his father’s sour triumph over his mother.

But then they go back to school and we’re left with Julia, a donut protagonist with a gaping hole where her inner life should be. It’s just a mystery why Julia, who has been in rooms with men like Pascal and Aleksander, has not developed a better sense for when someone is undercutting her. She is young, but she is established as a genius before starting college, so why she doesn’t have a better radar is a great question. It feels like we’re missing a motivation, some grounding reason for Julia to overlook so many red flags with Pascal and risk her future for such an insipid man. Lacking that context, Julia is less of a character, more of an idea of how a human being might behave.

There is something in The Julia Set that could work as an exploration of brilliant women in spaces choked with mediocre men, but the lack of central characterization hamstrings the whole film. But none of this is on Chase Infiniti. She does what she can with the material she was given, but even her undeniable star power can’t rescue The Julia Set from an undercooked concept.