Hollywood has a peculiar fascination with charismatic monsters. Philip Seymour Hoffman practically hypnotized audiences in The Master, while John Hawkes made a seemingly welcoming commune terrifying in Martha Marcy May Marlene. The trick is convincing people that devotion feels wonderful before revealing the trapdoors beneath it.

Lily James is now entering that unsettling territory, trading Cinderella's glass slippers for the instincts of a predator. In Guy Nattiv's The Liberation, she plays Ricki, a spiritual leader whose promise of healing conceals a frightening appetite for control.

Getting inside her head, however, proved an entirely different sort of nightmare.

Speaking to ScreenRant on the red carpet for her BFI London Film Festival, Lily James described the struggle of embodying a cult leader as deeply elusive.

"It was like endlessly elusive I felt like I found her and she would slip away from me again," James explained, admitting she couldn't simply think her way into the character. 

James explained that her character's core motive is protecting her tribe by any means necessary, describing her as a jaguar—acting on impulse, predatory, and driven by instinct. She did extensive animal work to tap into that physicality, treating the role less as a psychological puzzle and more as an embodied, instinctual performance.

At its heart, James sees the story as a difficult, painful love story about what extremes a person will go to in order to rid themselves of trauma and move past it. She noted that while she believes in parts of her character Ricki's teachings, she doesn't endorse where they spiral into the kind of control that defines cults. 

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And the woman caught in Ricki's orbit has a past heavy enough to make every promise of liberation dangerously persuasive.

Set in 1980s New Jersey, The Liberation follows Rita Cooper, a bank employee and Holocaust survivor carrying memories she can barely confront. An encounter with Ricki introduces her to a circle of women offering connection, self-acceptance, and relief. Then the invitation becomes a prison with excellent branding.

Lily James' performance as Ricki is already generating buzz as potentially watch-worthy, especially coming off her turn in Swiped, where she played Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd and earned a nod of approval from the CEO herself. That role proved James could carry a real-life figure with nuance, and The Liberation Cats gives her an even more demanding character to sink her teeth into.

The film's exploration of cult dynamics, trauma, and the cost of blind loyalty positions James for another transformative performance, one that could cement her range beyond period dramas and romantic comedies. With her track record of fully committing to complex characters, The Liberation is shaping up to be one of her most compelling projects yet.

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Would you follow Lily James into The Liberation's sinister commune? Let us know in the comments.