{"id":622497,"date":"2026-09-12T14:06:26","date_gmt":"2026-09-12T14:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/622497\/"},"modified":"2026-09-12T14:06:26","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T14:06:26","slug":"the-julia-set-review-chase-infiniti-confirms-her-movie-star-mettle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/622497\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Julia Set’ Review: Chase Infiniti Confirms Her Movie-Star Mettle"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThere are two major pieces of news to come out of \u201cThe Julia Set<\/a>,\u201d the nothing-short-of-terrific new movie that premiered tonight at the Toronto Film Festival. It\u2019s the first film to feature Chase Infiniti<\/a> since her breakout role as the Leonardo DiCaprio character\u2019s daughter in \u201cOne Battle After Another,\u201d and the first piece of news is that it confirms her movie-star mettle and astonishing quality of lyrical wised-up innocence as an actor.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe plays Julia Fischer, a math prodigy who\u2019s a freshman in college, and who makes the mistake \u2014 though she chooses it with big dark wide open eyes \u2014 of falling into a romantic relationship with her ridiculously good-looking dream-preppie teaching assistant, played by Christopher Briney (from \u201cThe Summer I Turned Pretty\u201d and the musical version of \u201cMean Girls\u201d).<\/p>\n

\n\tIn \u201cThe Julia Set,\u201d Infiniti portrays a numbers genius in the most convincing way possible \u2014 by wearing her virtuosity lightly and casually, as if it were second nature (which, for someone like Julia, it is). But she also makes Julia a disciplined and mature young woman who is still, by virtue of age and inexperience, just na\u00efve enough to be poised between asserting herself and following the lead of a dude she should have steered clear of. \u201cThe Julia Set\u201d isn\u2019t some moralistic cautionary melodrama. It\u2019s a true drama about how Julia, like all of us at some point, falls into a thorny experience she\u2019s not ready for, and how it shapes her.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe other piece of news, though, is that Niki Byrne, who wrote and directed the movie (her first feature), is a star in her own right \u2014 a born filmmaker who knows how to lure the audience in ways both heightened and supple. She\u2019s every bit as sharp a dialogue writer as she is a director. \u201cThe Julia Set\u201d could be called a coming-of-age movie, and it certainly has a lot to say about the insidious qualities of a bad romance, but part of its excitement is that it\u2019s not every day that we get to see the convincing tale of a math genius. Julia\u2019s off-the-charts intelligence, which Infiniti embodies with exquisite conviction, changes the stakes of the movie; we\u2019re rooting for her emotional salvation, but we\u2019re also rooting for her to dazzle the universe with her talent. The film could have been called \u201cGood Willa Hunting.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tInfiniti makes Julia a brilliant but grounded person who has very little ego invested in her talent. When her freshman TA, Pascal, takes a special interest in her, and starts to flirt with her, we feel the tension even more than we would have 10 years ago, because the very notion that a TA would try to date one of his students is more of an official no-no than it used to be. Yet Julia is aware of all that. And even as the film is too, it shows us we why she and Pascal are drawn to each other. They\u2019re both beautiful, and they\u2019re beautiful math geeks, which means that they\u2019re actually the rare people who can understand each other. Niki Byrne stages their heady shop-talk exchanges with a flippant density that keeps us hanging on every word.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt doesn\u2019t take us long to pick up on the dynamic that\u2019s going to toxify this relationship. Pascal is turned on by Julia\u2019s intelligence. But he\u2019s also subtly, insanely competitive with it. He invites her to join his advanced study group, presided over by the demanding Dr. Zatlan, played by the German actress Nina Hoss with a stern hauteur as mesmerizing as it is misanthropic. She\u2019s training the members of the study group to enter the Putnam Competition, a fabled math test, consisting of just 12 questions (it\u2019s been around for 100 years), that is widely considered to be the most difficult math test ever devised. The school is competing in it as a team, but so is each individual. For Julia, it could mean a ticket to MIT, a school she actually got into (along with Harvard and the University of Chicago and several others), but here she is attending her modest local college instead, because it\u2019s the place that offered her the best scholarship, and she wanted to stay near her family: her loving mother (Carmen Ejogo) and beloved older brother, Evan (Alex Dillard), who has Down syndrome.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first sign that something is up with Pascal \u2014 apart from the fact that no movie character since the age of John Hughes can look like this without being serious trouble \u2014 is when he performs disappointingly on a sample test, only to stalk out of the class, slap himself in the face, punch the bulletin board, and yell \u201cFuck!\u201d It only gets worse from there. Some viewers, schooled in the new absolutist morality, may say: With red flags being waved in her face, why doesn\u2019t Julia just ditch this loser? But what the movie is saying is: It doesn\u2019t always work that way. Byrne stages a superb sequence in which Pascal takes Julia to meet his parents. His father is a legendary mathematician, Aleksander Mandelbrot, played by Jason Isaacs in the most sly performance he has ever given. We can see that Aleksander is a narcissist who gets off on competing with his son, but what a magnetic dick! The scene in which he plays chess with Pascal is brilliantly done \u2014 we see their whole life story in that game. And Pascal\u2019s mother, played with mournful spirit by Gillian Anderson, humanizes the whole situation.<\/p>\n

\n\tChase Infiniti leads us through \u201cThe Julia Set\u201d by making her performance a true character study. Her Julia is cool and cunning and together; she\u2019s also in over her smarter-than-everyone-else\u2019s head. She wants to be a prodigy, a worldly success, a devoted daughter, and to be in love \u2014\u00a0all good things. But in this movie they\u2019re often in extreme conflict. And Infiniti makes Julia radiant in that very confusion. There is, of course, a climactic math competition. There is Adderall abuse and a car accident, and there is some next-level gaslighting. There are reckonings. Yet it all flows, because Niki Byrne unfurls this story with such panache and precision yet such effortless conviction. It\u2019s clear that Byrne, along with Chase Infiniti, is going to be a major player. Just watch the movie and do the math.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are two major pieces of news to come out of \u201cThe Julia Set,\u201d the nothing-short-of-terrific new movie…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":622498,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[11603,93,61,60,270,264288,1745],"class_list":["post-622497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-chase-infiniti","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies","tag-the-julia-set","tag-tiff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=622497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/622498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=622497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=622497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=622497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}