The only reason this fabulous DreamWorks animation is not nearer the top of this list is that Pugh is not the star – that’s Antonio Banderas as Puss. But her Goldilocks, head of the Three Bears crime family, is surely channelling none other than the great Billie Whitelaw in The Krays.
Pugh is sparkiness personified as Jean Tatlock, Oppenheimer’s communist girlfriend in Christopher Nolan’s mighty biopic. Nolan, perhaps sensitive to charges that his films lack sex appeal, shoehorns some clumsily filmed copulation into her scenes with Cillian Murphy. Alas, she succumbs to the director’s recurring “fridged woman” punishment motif.
Seventeen-year-old Pugh is so compelling in her screen debut that her disappearance midway through Carol Morley’s film, in which 1960s schoolgirls are stricken with mysterious fainting fits, is felt as keenly by the audience as by her classmates. The role of the most popular, precocious, rebellious girl fits the actor like a glove, and she has been knocking it out of the park ever since.
In the first of 2019’s three madly contrasting roles, Pugh plays a scruffy English wrestler who finds herself a fish out of water when she tries to make it in the US WWE. Stephen Merchant’s feelgood biopic is stronger on her travails in Florida than her brother’s problems back in Norwich, but the rising star’s gutsy physical performance really does make you believe she could piledrive you into the canvas.
The meet-cute, kids-vs-career conflict and tear-jerking denouement in John Crowley’s romantic weepie benefit from non-linear storytelling (Pugh’s fringe is a foolproof flashback signifier), making the story less formulaic than a chronological synopsis might suggest. But what elevates it are powerhouse performances from Andrew Garfield and, especially, Pugh as a Michelin-starred chef who cracks eggs and gets her head shaved on camera.
Scarlett Johansson is the star, but Pugh, speaking with a Russian accent as Natasha’s “sister” Yelena, is the MVP in Cate Shortland’s action pic, more grounded than the usual Marvel CGI-fest (at least until the final act). Sisterly shenanigans include a full-on kitchen fight and poking fun at superhero posing. And hurrah! Yelena will be back in next year’s Thunderbolts*.
A pity Netflix’s folk-mystery thriller from the excellent Chilean director Sebastián Lelio had only a limited theatrical release, as it’s one of Pugh’s most satisfying performances. She plays a tenacious English nurse who in 1862 is assigned to a deeply religious community in rural Ireland to report on a young girl who has been surviving without food. But all is not as it seems …
Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic is another film where potential overfamiliarity is usefully blunted by non-linear storytelling. It also benefits from Amy’s promotion from bratty little sister to virtual co-lead alongside Saoirse Ronan’s Jo. Pugh matures effortlessly (again with the passing years denoted by a changing hairdo) and earned an Oscar nomination for almost stealing the film.
Screenwriter Alice Birch transposes Nikolai Leskov’s novella, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, to 19th century rural Northumberland. Pugh confirms her promise as one of film’s most exciting new talents with an un-ingratiating performance as a young woman, trapped in an unendurable marriage, who resorts to adultery and poisonous mushrooms. But not before Pugh has turned the “resting bitch face” into high art.
The slow-burn impact of Ari Aster’s folk-horror, in which a bunch of young Americans are invited to partake of pagan rituals in a remote part of Sweden, entirely rests on the shoulders of Pugh, playing a bereaved student whose raw grief is barely tolerated by her boyfriend and his buddies. Incredibly, her sustained bouts of hysterical weeping and disorientation feel so authentically heartbroken it’s hard not to empathise with her trauma. A remarkable performance.
