Ry Russo-Young gives difficult people a sympathetic hearing and teenage stories careful visual attention. We value her patience with actors, though her fiction can leave too much unexamined when it needs to ask harder questions.
Fi1m perspective
In Before I Fall (2017), moody, layered lighting and anamorphic lenses give a teenage story depth without flooding it with brightness. Russo-Young’s care with the image is a strength, and cinematographers Michael Fimognari and Christopher Blauvelt are among her collaborators. She gives performers similar attention, encouraging nuanced portrayals rather than sorting people into good and bad. We like that generosity, though it can leave difficult behaviour insufficiently examined.
The early independent features Orphans (2007) and You Won’t Miss Me (2009) led to Nobody Walks (2012), co-written with Lena Dunham. That film brought wider recognition, though its storytelling could be clearer about what is happening between its characters. The move into studio young-adult adaptations began with Before I Fall, followed by The Sun Is Also a Star (2019). The change of scale did not mean abandoning her interest in how people behave around one another.
In episodic television, those concerns turn up again in Shrinking (2023), with more uneven results. We warmed to Harrison Ford’s dry comedy; it made us want to stay with a programme whose hurried treatment of grief was testing our patience. Jason Segel’s vulnerability also makes the therapist worth attending to. There is value in asking us to sit with somebody whose behaviour is difficult to defend.
The problem is how readily Shrinking lets that therapist’s broken boundaries pass without sufficient scrutiny. The writing needs to spend longer considering the harm those breaches can cause. That weakness cannot fairly be laid at Russo-Young’s door simply because she directed for the series, nor can we give her sole credit for Ford’s comedy. The performances make it worth trying, with the reservation about its treatment of grief firmly in place.
Her move into the personal documentary Nuclear Family (2021) complicates any view of her as a director settled into safe fiction assignments. Its attention to multiple perspectives develops her interest in people who cannot readily be labelled villains, with more personal material to examine. For a clearer look at her visual judgement, begin with Before I Fall.
Biography
Ry Russo-Young is an American filmmaker and director. She was born in New York City on 16 November 1981 and attended Oberlin College and Saint Ann's School.
Her early independent features include Orphans (2007) and Nobody Walks (2012), the latter co-written with Lena Dunham. She later directed the features Before I Fall (2017) and The Sun Is Also a Star (2019).
On television she has directed episodes of Everything Sucks! (2018), Sweetbitter (2018), Marvel's Cloak & Dagger (2018), And Just Like That… (2021) and Shrinking (2023). She also directed and appeared in the HBO documentary series Nuclear Family (2021).
