Haley Lu Richardson

Casey stands in front of a building in Columbus, Indiana, and tells a visitor when it was built and who designed it and why it matters. She is fluent and bright and slightly too quick, and when he asks her what she thinks, she goes quiet. That is the thing Haley Lu Richardson does that most young actors do not. She plays the business of seeming fine so well that we notice the effort only when it stops.

Columbus (2017) was Kogonada's first film and her breakthrough. Before it she had done television from 2013 and supporting film parts in 2016, among them The Edge of Seventeen and Split, parts in other people's stories. Kogonada gave her a whole film of walking and talking and trusted her to carry half of it, and she carried more than half; our review found Jin's side of the story the thinner one. We were moved by her more than the film's stillness seemed to allow, and it was a small thing that did it: the way she recites the facts about each building with practised ease and then has nothing rehearsed to say about herself.

Since then the career has gone two ways at once. There is the mainstream work, Five Feet Apart (2019), and there is the smaller, more collaborative sort she seems to prefer: Support the Girls (2018), Unpregnant (2020), and After Yang (2022), which took her back to Kogonada for a second film. Then The White Lotus (2022), in which she played Portia, brought her far more attention than any of the films had, and a character audiences argued about. We have not reviewed those, so we will not judge them here, except to note that the notices keep saying the same thing: warmth, naturalism, a habit of turning parts that read flat on the page into full people.

That is a real gift and it is also a hazard. An actress who can make a thin character breathe will keep being handed thin characters, on the assumption she will do the work the script did not. She has said she has "retired from playing teenagers", which is the right instinct, and Ponies, a series due in 2026, will show whether the parts have grown with her. What we would like is another director who does what Kogonada did: put her in front of something she loves and let the camera wait for the moment she stops talking.