Everyone’s got their favorite iconic performances from iconic performers. Everyone also probably has that one performance from someone not everyone may have heard about that they wish more people did.
In my case, I’ve got quite a few. Here are some of my favorite, most overlooked performances from the 2020s so far.
1. Juliette Gariépy in Red Rooms
Red Rooms is a French-Canadian psychological thriller that follows Gariépy as Kelly-Anne. An online hacker who becomes obsessed with a man on trial for serial murder. As the case becomes more complicated, she goes to increasingly problematic lengths to retrieve the final piece of evidence needed to convict him.
The film deals with relatively newfound themes in the true crime genre involving obsession with the type of content made about it today, the effect it has on the victim’s families, and the level of depravity sometimes required of those trying to do the “right thing”. Gariépy’s performance is absolutely chilling. Her character is molded to be rather quiet and ambiguous in terms of motivations for why she’s doing the things she’s doing. You’re never fully aware of whether or not she’s doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. In fact, she often fully does the wrong thing for the wrong reasons.
This kind of back-and-forth with a character can easily become annoying or disjointed, but her horrifying baseline of a facial performance is what is able to so beautifully sustain the film.
2. Adam Driver in Ferrari
Michael Mann’s late-stage biopic about Enzo Ferrari makes a few cardinal choices that a lot of films by late-stage filmmakers do that push some audience members away. It has an intense focus on themes without traditional story beats. It's really sad, and the characters often speak in abstract phrases instead of normal conversational flow.
At the center of it all, though, is Adam Driver’s electric performance as Ferrari himself. His character starts in this film where most biopic characters of his type end their films. Broken, beaten, and clawing at hope for the future. It’s Driver’s signature quiet gravitas that carries the film over the finish line. It’s one of his finest performances, and people unfortunately almost wrote it off entirely.
3. Christian Friedel in The Zone of Interest
‘The Zone of Interest’Credit: A24
Films that deal with the Holocaust have become more difficult in recent years to stand out amongst the rest just due to how many famous award winners there already are. The Zone of Interest didn’t get a ton of awards attention, but it more than earns its spot amongst the greatest Holocaust films ever made.
Christian Friedel plays the Nazi father of a German family who sets up their beautiful house directly outside of a Jewish concentration camp. We never see the cruelty behind the walls of their house, but the sound and flashes of visuals continuously creep through, eating away at our senses and Höss’ (Friedel) soul.
The film’s freight train of a conclusion where Höss makes himself sick in a hallway straight out of Hell itself is one of the most timely, heart-wrenching scenes in recent cinematic memory.
4. Vanessa Kirby in Pieces of a Woman
If we’re going off of performances that lacked awards attention, then Vanessa Kirby’s performance in Pieces of a Woman may not entirely qualify. She was nominated for a Lead Actress Oscar for her role; however, the film was released in the heart of the pandemic, and for most viewers, was a straight-to-Netflix film, despite a brief, awards-qualifying limited theatrical run. As a result, after that year’s awards run, it seems to have faded from the limelight.
Despite the unfortunate timing of release, her performance is one that has stuck with me ever since I first saw the film. Her ability to seemingly drain so much energy out of herself in every single frame, yet still come back with so much subtle intensity, is absolutely mind-blowing. It’s not a performance you’ll want to find yourself revisiting often due to the tragedy of it all, but if you’re a student of the medium, it is far from one that you should miss.
5. John Boyega in Breaking
‘Breaking’Caption: Bleecker Street
In a modern riff on the 70s classic, Dog Day Afternoon, Breaking tells the true story of Marine veteran Brian Brown-Easley (Boyega), who held a bank hostage with an explosive in an effort to receive his withheld VA payments.
Unfortunately, the plot of this film is one that we have seen many times before and since, but Boyega brings a level of immediate desperation to his role that really separates him into his own category amongst other roles like his. The empathy he brings to his main character, and how he treats the people he’s holding captive, along with the brief glimpses we get into his backstory via flashback, immediately connect us with a man who has been wronged so horribly by the world he sought to improve. Like many Star Wars actors, he has been moderately typecast in his roles as Finn, but Breaking shows that in a post-sequel trilogy world, he still has so much to offer as an artist.
