Lavender star Abbie Cornish on finding her scary face

In Lavender, Abbie Cornish plays an amnesia-stricken photographer who must piece together her memories and confront her haunting past in order to save her family.

The hallucinatory film, from director and co-writer Ed Gass-Donnelly (Small Town Murder Songs, This Beautiful City), represents a genre shift for Cornish, whose previous credits include RoboCop and Sucker Punch.

“I felt like there was a tone to it that was different than anything I had read before,” Cornish told EW during the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, where Lavender had its world premiere. “It was almost like a drama within a thriller within a horror movie, ghost movie. It was something I felt like I could still sink my teeth into as an actor, but also explore this whole new world.”

Part of that exploration meant discovering her “scary face.”

“I was caught up in, how do I play this role in a way that’s not overplayed?” she said. “And I was thinking, ‘What is scary face? How big or how small is scary face?’ And then I realized that as long as I played each moment honestly, that it would have a good arc.”

Watch the video above to find out which Nicole Kidman movie provided inspiration for Lavender, which also stars Dermot Mulroney, Justin Long, and Diego Klattenhoff.