The Wife

The most interesting casting decision here connects directly to the story. Joan Castleman as a young woman is played by Annie Starke, Glenn Close's actual daughter. You are watching the same face forty years apart, performed by mother and daughter. The plot concerns a celebrated novelist travelling to Stockholm to collect the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the wife who has spent a lifetime standing behind him, carrying his career and keeping a secret. The days before the ceremony are the days that arrangement finally cracks. It is adapted from Meg Wolitzer's 2003 novel and directed by Björn Runge. Jonathan Pryce plays the husband and Christian Slater a would-be biographer circling her story. Close was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar and did not win. Who it is for: viewers who like performance films that run across a single face, where suppressed anger is at its most visible. Who it is not for: anyone hunting a twist. The secret is guessable early, and the tension comes not from the information but from what she decides to do with it.