Apple and A24 have dropped the first look at Jennifer Lawrence’s upcoming big-screen return, opposite Brian Tyree Henry as two people bonded by trauma, in Causeway.
Directed by first-time feature director Lila Neugebauer (Broadway’s The Waverly Gallery, Netflix’s Maid, The Last Thing He Told Me), the film features the Oscar winner as Lynsey, a military engineer who has returned to the States from Afghanistan with a debilitating brain injury. The Atlanta and Bullet Train star plays James, a stranger who offers her a ride home and is also suppressing his own past trauma. The two begin to seek out each other’s company as they provide solace to each other on their journey to recovery.
The movie will play in select theaters and globally on Apple TV+ Nov. 4.
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Lawrence last appeared in Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up for Netflix and will reteam with McKay for Apple’s Bad Blood, playing disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Her last big theatrical feature film was 2019’s X-Men: Dark Phoenix.
In Causeway, Lawrence as Lynsey faces a painful and slow recovery from an injury sustained after an IED explosion. But when she returns home to New Orleans, she has to face memories even more aching and formative than those she had in service: a reckoning with her childhood. When she meets James, the two damaged souls’ budding friendship forms the heart of Neugebauer’s debut feature — described as “a quiet but devastating, and ultimately uplifting, story about coming to terms and moving forward.”
Causeway also marks the first film produced by Lawrence’s production company Excellent Cadaver. The film began production in 2019, before shutting down amid the pandemic and resuming in 2021. In a recent Vogue profile, the Winter’s Bone actress said of why she took on the role: “Her untenable home, her inability to commit to one thing or another because of these internal injuries that are completely invisible but huge — I think I connected with that at that specific time in my life. So much was going on with me at that time that I didn’t realize. Until I was back, pregnant, married, making it. And I was just like, ‘Oh, this is a woman who is scared to commit.’”
In THR‘s review of the film, which had its world premiere at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, chief film critic David Rooney praises the chemistry between the pair.
“Causeway marked Lawrence’s first new project after announcing she was taking a breather for a year, and it’s a pleasure to see her return to her indie roots, especially once Henry’s presence prompts her to up her game,” he wrote in his review. “He digs deep in ways we haven’t seen much from him since his indelible single scene in If Beale Street Could Talk. The chemistry between these two excellent actors, each of them quite distinct in style, sneaks up on you and enriches this modest drama about bruised people lowering their guard enough to seek comfort.”
Causeway is written by Ottessa Moshfegh, Luke Goebel and Elizabeth Sanders and produced by Lawrence and Justine Ciarrocchi. Neugebauer, Jacob Jaffke, Sophia Lin, Patricia Clarkson, Kirk Michael Fellows and Christopher J. Surgent are executive producers.
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