The Julia Set: Chase Infiniti levels up a college romance coming-of-ager
There’s no doubt Chase Infiniti is star, but Niki Byrne’s debut feature, which features the actress as a gifted young mathematician, is too bogged down in exposition to really let her shine.
- Reviewed from the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival
Call it One Equation After Another. Playing a nascent mathematics prodigy trying to untap her intellectual potential in The Julia Set, Chase Infiniti acts up a storm with her forehead; there’s a furious sense of processing going on behind Julia’s brows.
It’s a tidy if unconvincing irony of Niki Byrne’s debut feature that its namesake is great with numbers, to the point that she’s being touted as a future Fields Medal recipient, but can’t seem to solve for — wait for it — the variables of first love.
It’s clear from the moment that college freshman Julia (Infiniti) locks eyes with post-grad superstar Pascal (Christopher Briney) during prep sessions for the harrowing ritual known as the Putnam Test that she’s a goner. He’s a skilful seducer who knows how to keep a T.A.’s pet on a tight leash; he pulls in Julia by secretly administering a higher-end test than the one written by her classmates and hand-scribbling an A-grade as she waits by his desk, a gambit that has the same mesmeric effect on an overachieving loner as a One-Wish Willow. What’s also obvious is that the only way that our brilliant, anxious, underdog heroine, who comes from humble stock and doesn’t want to abandon her working-class family for the Ivy Leagues, will achieve the self-actualisation she’s chasing is to – again, wait for it – choose herself. Or, to put it into terms the film’s characters might prefer: she has to subtract from her life precisely one narcissistic, competitive, undermining yutz, even if he’s gorgeous and charming and has a nice apartment on campus and tells her he’s in love with her shortly after their first date (maybe especially because of that last one, actually).
Predictability isn’t necessarily a problem in a film like The Julia Set, which makes no real attempt to hotwire its chosen genre – the cautionary coming-of-age college romance – nor to disguise its influences. The imagery of chalkboards evokes Good Will Hunting (1997), as does one late and important line of dialogue; Nina Hoss’ imperious study group major-domo Dr. Zatlan answers the question of what Tár (2022) would have looked like if Hoss had swapped roles with Cate Blanchett. The issue is that Byrne doesn’t trust her audience for even a second to respond to the material’s themes of independence, originality and integrity, and so she turns characters into mouthpieces and entire sequences into stump speeches. Julia roommate Erin (Chloe Bailey) seems to exist solely to prod her bestie’s conscience, which is fine, but Byrne doubles down by simultaneously asking Gillian Anderson – as Pascal’s loving but sceptical ex-academic mother – to partake of the Jiminy Cricket shtick as well; suffice it to say that the actress seemed to have more fun earlier this year doing Norma Desmond in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.
The most enjoyable performances here are by the alpha-male-nerd-bad guys: not just Briney, who’s delightfully despicable as entitled failson, but also a fabulously nasty Jason Isaacs as the branch from which the rotten apple has fallen. The scene where Pascal first brings Julia to his parents’ palatial pad for a weekend of wine and interrogation is scarier than anything in Get Out (2017): not content with simply lording his myriad accomplishments over his family and their guest, the Good Doctor literalises his malevolent game-master persona by breaking out the chess board. It’s a heavy-handed metaphor for manipulation that’s doubled later on by Julia’s embrace of the less adversarial – and more fulfilling – black-and-white metaphysics of the boardgame Go, a clever bit of screenwriting suggesting Byrne can do better than the surrounding clichés.
As for Infiniti, she’s definitely a star, and keeps the camera magnetised whenever she’s onscreen, which is pretty much all of the time. Her performance would be more impressive, perhaps, if we were allowed to make up our minds about Julia instead of having her virtues and flaws narrated to us by the people around her – they’re less like characters in a drama than a Greek Chorus. The Julia Set isn’t stylised enough to make that approach work and is so determined to provide uplift that even its darkest moments feel like goldbricking. The various plot points, emotional setbacks, and eleventh-hour catharses are so carefully worked out that there’s nothing to do but tote them up; in the end, there’s nothing left over, no remainder except for the credits.