“The Actor” (2025) feels like a Charlie Kaufman script directed by Damien Chazelle. It is bittersweet, charming, and immersive like a Chazelle film that lingers in your mind long after, but it follows a dreamlike logic and revels in its inherent absurdity like a Kaufman script. Somehow, their distinct styles coalesce in Duke Johnson’s surrealistic mystery film to offer a captivating confusion. It constantly puts its protagonist, Paul Cole (André Holland), at odds with himself. After waking up from an accident, he learns that he was beaten up for sleeping with a married woman. He loses most of his memories.
The husband shows no mercy to this man and throws him out. Suddenly, he finds himself stranded in a small town with no one to call his own. He enters with no recollection of the life he had led till then. He only vaguely recalls someone calling him ‘an actor’ in the hospital. However, that memory isn’t going to feed him. So, he looks for any job he can get in an attempt to start his life afresh. His memories might be cloudy, but he understands what a human needs and feels. So, he finds a way to get food and shelter and along the way, falls in love.
The man spends a lonely night in a near-empty theater in the company of Edna (Gemma Chan), the only other person in the audience. They notice but do not speak to or acknowledge each other. Eventually, they cross paths at a local bar and have their meet-cute moment. They experience all the cliches of romance and how it puts people in a hazy, trance-like state. The world suddenly goes dark when they start speaking. They feel like they are the only two people existing in a liminal space. Much of it is shown in a fairly literal manner.
It informs us about the man’s emotional state. Simultaneously, it becomes a way for him to understand his reality. As an amnesiac, he questions the validity of every single thing happening to him. He remains stuck between the life he fell into and the one he left behind. What is truth for someone who is sculpting it as he goes along? The script examines this as the protagonist tries to find a footing. Traces of his past show up now and then. However, with his partial memory loss, even his past self feels like a role he is supposed to play.
“The Actor” plays out like a maze of all these quandaries. It’s no surprise that Charlie Kaufman was once attached to this project, considering his work on “Synecdoche, New York.” Kaufman’s 2008 film navigated a theater director’s life through his art and vice versa. Duke Johnson’s film also navigates his character’s confusion as a human and an actor. Both inform each other and how he looks at life.
Much like the nameless protagonist of Aki Kaurismaki’s “The Man Without a Past,” Paul battles the daily complications of his past-less identity. He understands love, fear, and resentment as any other human, but that doesn’t help him prove his personhood. Amid all these complications, he tries to play a part much like an actor would. Even his past is another role that he needs to fill in the gaps for with a backstory, whether informed or invented. It leads us to question the nature of human existence. Is it only informed by the things we possess and the places we inhabit? The film begs us to consider.
At its core, Duke Johnson’s film is about human consciousness and its ever-evolving nature. However, he puts this thought in a layered and admittedly confusing package. What begins as Paul Cole’s journey back to his real life becomes an investigation of the nature of life itself. Paul falls into the same rabbit hole as the viewers, which turns the film into a gloomy affair. In the end, it becomes an ambitious effort to philosophize his anguish.
“The Actor” is captivating when it uses Paul’s despair to illuminate us on the possibilities of life. Whether as an actor or a person, the thought of inhabiting different characters can be intoxicating. It captures the essence of similar out-of-body experiences and their appeal. So, at times, it also feels like a meditation on the method-acting approach. However, it remains vastly focused on crafting an allegory with these theories rather than crafting its characters. It offers us plenty to think about Paul’s plight but not a lot to care for him beyond his confusion. André Holland’s sincere performance brings humanity to his character, but that is not enough to fill the emotional gaps in the script.
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