Jennifer Lawrence Delivers a Masterclass in Quiet Stoicism in ‘Causeway’ on Apple TV+

Jennifer Lawrence is back in her element in Causeway, a new A24 drama that began streaming on Apple TV+ today. It’s a movie that will remind you why you fell in love with Lawrence in the first place—and why she won an Oscar at the tender age of 22. It’s because she’s just so dang good at playing those imperturbable, tough-on-the-outside characters. Whether she’s keeping her siblings alive in a dirt-poor region of rural Missouri in Winter’s Bone or participating in a fight-to-the-death child cage match in The Hunger Games, Lawrence knows how to be the woman who puts on a brave face in the face of extreme duress. And she knows how to make the rest of us cry while she’s doing it.

In Causeway, Lawrence stars as Lynsey, a military engineer who returns home to New Orleans to recover from a debilitating brain injury sustained in Afghanistan. She goes through the motions of physical therapy, allowing herself to be hauled around by the facility nurse (played by the always-great Jayne Houdyshell), who comforts Lynsey through panic attacks and endures her (accidental) verbal abuse with motherly empathy. Eventually, Lynsey reaches the point where she is able to drive herself around, prompting her caretaker to proudly declare her fit to leave. Lynsey smiles—then, in a matter of seconds, her face falls, and she silently begins to cry. Without saying a word, Lawrence clues audiences into exactly what her character is feeling: She’s not ready to go.

But the real testament to Lawrence’s talent is a scene near the end of the first act, at a check-up appointment between Lynsey and her neurologist (played by Stephen McKinley Henderson, another great). Lynsey wants to go off her medication, and the doctor pushes Lynsey to describe what caused her injury. He already has the clinical account of what happened on her chart—”cerebral hemorrhaging acquired in an explosion in Afghanistan while traveling in a vehicle”—but he’s looking for her version of the events, to help him diagnose how she’s processing the trauma. Reluctantly, Lynsey launches into a detached recollection of this horrifying experience.

This time, there are no tears. Lawrence keeps her deliberately even, but in a way that you can tell it’s taking a lot of effort for Lynsey to maintain her composure. She stumbles only slightly as she describes watching men burn alive and slaughtered in front of her. Those tiny hitches in Lawrence’s breath, the quick way she averts her eyes, speak volumes. Her face is a masterclass in microexpressions, and her restraint is infinitely more effective than sobbing and screaming. The speech itself is hardly poetry, and perhaps in a less capable actor’s hands, it wouldn’t have been such a devastating blow. But this is JLaw, the queen of quiet stoicism, and she knocks it out of the park.

Following her Oscar win for Winter’s Bone and her financial success in The Hunger Games franchise, Lawrence gravitated toward sexier, wilder, more manic roles—an unstable widow in Silver Linings Playbook, a chaotic con artist in American Hustle, a beautiful object of desire in Passengers, a deadly assassin in Red Sparrow, an angry grad student in Don’t Look Up. Don’t get it twisted, she’s good in all of those roles. She has the range! But Causeway is a reminder that she’s really, really good at this particular brand of restraint. All hail the queen.