Director Niki Byrne’s frustratingly melodramatic “The Julia Set” is a film that hints at complexity and nuance but often settles for the lowest common denominator in its execution.
It has a lot to say but lacks the grace of easy digestion, unsure of how to move its story along without resorting to communicating its ideas in the most heavy-handed ways possible. It has a lot working for it, namely actors who are far too talented for the script they’ve been saddled with, but it all adds up to less than the sum of its parts.
I’ll confess that I had my doubts about how one could make mathematics cinematic, and at the start of Byrne’s film, she assuages fears in part by demonstrating how the language of the world runs on these concepts we often restrict to our classroom. The drama of our daily lives can be refracted through the language of theorems, proofs and algorithms, and it’s a language Julia (Chase Infiniti) knows well. She’s a student at university who can solve differential equations better than her whole class, yet has grown accustomed to making herself small so as not to draw attention.
Even if you’ve appreciated Infiniti’s work prior, “The Julia Set” lets you fall in love with her talent all over again, particularly with her mastery of eye acting. Every time she stares, furrowing her brow at a worksheet placed before her or looking longingly at the TA, Pascal (Christopher Briney), who fires back reciprocal interest, you see that there’s a world of emotion waiting to be unleashed.
The hypothetical becomes tangible when Julia and Pascal begin a relationship and train for a prestigious mathematics competition called The Putnam Exam, where students have six hours to complete 12 intense questions. They are to be trained by Professor Dr. Zatlan (a delightfully draconian Nina Hoss), who makes her favorites known and is punitive towards any mistakes. Both Pascal and Julia, in trying to prepare for the competition, also try to vie for Zatlan’s affections, with Pascal feeling particular pressure as he’s the son of a renowned mathematics giant.
With the talent that Byrne has assembled to play the antagonistic adults (Hoss is only in the film for brief moments, but her scenes where she eviscerates her students leave a lasting mark), it’s curious that her script chooses to instead focus on the rapidly deteriorating relationship between Julia and Pascal. Pascal begins to grow jealous of Julia’s talent, and from that jealousy, begins to shame her, calling her a distraction from him pursuing his studies.
It would be tragic to see them feud if their dynamic was built up in any meaningful way, and if Birney could better communicate a sense of maliciousness that doesn’t feel cartoonish. It often feels as though the actor is trying to portray a facsimile of an emotion rather than embodying it, and as Pacal’s behavior becomes more monstrous, it becomes less believable. It is easy to condemn, but the obvious cruelty calls into question the affection Byrne wants us to have for Julia. It’s hard to imagine someone as smart as her giving herself so wholeheartedly to a sappy soyboy without properly testing the theorem.
Therein lies the problem with “The Julia Set” in that, by admirably choosing to focus on the ways women are told to minimize themselves and their accomplishments in male-dominated fields, and by creating antagonists who are evil to the point of caricature, it absolves the audience. The film presents a simple equation when a more complex proof would be in order: we can simply critique Pascal’s chauvinism, which he inherited from his equally toxic father (a catty Jason Isaacs, making a meal out of narrative crumbs) rather than look inward.
It’s far too easy to point out the flaws in others, and Byrne’s urgent points would have benefited from an approach that more tactfully unsettles its viewers. When people are presented in such binaries, it removes any stakes, and interest quickly wanes.
There’s also a cornucopia of half-baked ideas or unresolved points that also drag the film down. Gillian Anderson, as Pascal’s mother, is an interesting mirror of Julia. She too is caught in a union with a man who finds his only source of strength in keeping her silenced, yet while there’s a parallel, it’s never expanded upon in a meaningful way. Chloe Bailey delights as Julia’s best friend and the only one who is willing to tell the prodigy the truth, but she’s often reduced either to comic relief or to a mouthpiece to vaguely touch on issues of race that Byrne either doesn’t fully understand or lacks the patience to tackle with nuance.
There are glimmers of craft worth praising, though they’re too few and far between. Take a moment when Byrne trusts her visuals to do the work: when Julia goes to use the restroom before the competition, she walks past a long line of men waiting to use the bathroom and enters the women’s one without any delay. So much is communicated in just that wordless moment, and had “The Julia Set” had more of those scenes, it might have added up to something truly sensational.
As it stands, it provides all the enjoyment of running through multiplication tables: fun at the start, trite by the end.
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