In “Matt and Mara” and “Measures for a Funeral,” the actress delivers herself to the story.
Kazik Radwanski’s Matt and Mara is now streaming exclusively on MUBI in many countries.
To the horror and delight of Toronto filmgoers, there is a moment in Kazik Radwanski’s Matt and Mara (2024) when the lead actress cups a palmful of water from the outdoor fountains at Yonge-Dundas Square and splashes her face, her mouth slightly agape. One does not do this (locals will note a vague air of urine around the intersection). The action is especially baffling for this previously reserved character, who then jetés over the spurting jets. It’s a moment of modest physical comedy that reveals the protean mannerisms of both the character and the actress, Canadian indie stalwart Deragh Campbell.
There was a certain hum around this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, with the double-barrelled Canadian premieres of Matt and Mara and Sofia Bohdanowicz’s Measures for a Funeral (2024), two character studies starring Campbell.1 Campbell, who has maintained a working relationship with both directors for nearly a decade, is indispensable to Toronto’s independent film scene and has been hailed as “a next-gen Gena Rowlands” for her expressivity and tendency to gesticulate. The daughter of theater director Jackie Maxwell and stage actor Benedict Campbell, she is perhaps best known for her leading role in Radwanski’s Anne at 13,000 Ft. (2019), where she plays a volatile daycare worker collapsing under daily pressures after skydiving at a bachelorette party.
Campbell was studying creative writing in Montreal when she was cast in her first film, I Used to Be Darker (2013), a moment she described in 2019 as a “sharp break” between her writing and acting lives. I Used to Be Darker, along with her second feature film Stinking Heaven (2015), were both low-budget American productions, each to some degree about disturbances to domestic order. In both, Campbell plays a troubled character feeling her way through fraught circumstances—teen pregnancy and alcoholism, respectively. In the mid-2010s, Campbell decided to turn to Canadian films, in large part because she did not consider herself “competitive enough” for the bigger-budget American market.
“The intersection of art and commerce has always made me a bit uncomfortable, and I need to find ways to make it a bit more human for myself,” Campbell tells me in November in the kitchen of her Toronto apartment. “I have a hard time even thinking of myself as an actor. I largely think of myself as an audience member and a reader, and acting as a way to be inside of a story.”
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