Causeway
Cert 15| ★★★★✩

After a successful first foray into the comedy world in Adam McKay’s heavily coded end-of-the-world satire Don’t Look Up in 2021, Jennifer Lawrence is now back with a more serious part in Lila Neugebauer’s impressive debut feature Causeway, which is streaming in the UK on Apple TV +.

Causeway also stars Brian Tyree Henry and is co-written by Ottessa Moshfegh, Luke Goebel and Elizabeth Sanders. Lawrence and Henry are already getting some serious award season buzz for their phenomenal performances as two broken people attempting to mend one another.

Lawrence plays Lynsey, an American soldier struggling to adjust at home after a traumatic brain injury puts her out of action. After a short stay at a rehab facility for injured veterans, the young woman is forced to return to her hometown to recover.

Feeling suffocated by her overbearing, heavy-drinking mother (Linda Emond), Lindsay finds solace in a new friendship with amiable amputee car mechanic James (Henry).

The two discover that they have more in common than they expected.
This unfussy, subdued, gorgeously layered drama is a far cry from the showier roles in The Hunger Games and Silver Linings Playbook that made Lawrence into a household name over a decade ago, and it is one of her best and most accomplished performances yet.

Causeway

Jennifer Lawrence

Here she gives the same kind of self-assured, yet stripped down delivery that made the whole world fall in love with her in Debra Granik’s 2010 film Winter’s Bone.
Neugebauer’s film does exactly what is expected from it while featuring two truly phenomenal turns throughout.

And if last year’s Best Picture Oscar-winner Coda is to go by, it’s clear that Apple has once again got itself another success story.

It is though areal shame that more of us didn’t get the chance to see this on a bigger screen.