Renate Reinsve’s 2026 Is a Study in Discomfort on Purpose

Most actors building momentum reach for the role that confirms what audiences already like about them. Renate Reinsve’s 2026 slate does the opposite. Between a grief drama that unsettles by design and an A24 horror project built on one of the internet’s strangest shared nightmares, she’s assembled a year that reads less like a victory lap after her festival breakout and more like a deliberate refusal to be easy to place.

In Butterfly, she plays a woman who returns to Gran Canaria with her half-sister after their mother’s death, only to find the two of them have inherited an unfinished spiritual retreat sitting in the middle of a landscape thick with memory neither of them asked for. The film works through the sisters’ grief and their tangled relationship alongside the open questions their mother left behind about her own hidden life, folding dark comedy and a touch of magical realism into what could easily have been a straightforward mourning story. What makes it worth watching isn’t the premise so much as the choice to sit inside discomfort rather than resolve it quickly — the film seems less interested in closure than in the strange, half-funny, half-devastating texture of finding out a parent was a stranger the whole time.

Backrooms moves in a completely different register, and that’s precisely the point. Paired with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Reinsve steps into a horror project built on one of the most widely circulated pieces of internet folklore of the last several years — a mysterious door in the basement of a furniture showroom that opens onto endless corridors lit by sickly fluorescent light, corridors that seem to run on a logic no map could capture. A research institution tries to make sense of what’s happening while the people trapped inside sink further into a maze that offers no clear direction out. Adapting internet-native horror for a theatrical audience is a real gamble — the appeal of that kind of story often lives in its ambiguity, in the fact that nobody fully explains it — and casting an actress known for emotionally exacting, grounded performances against that kind of abstract dread is its own kind of bet.

What ties the two projects together isn’t genre; it’s temperature. Grief handled at an angle, horror built on disorientation rather than jump scares — both ask an audience to sit with something unresolved rather than deliver the comfort of a tidy emotional arc. That’s a harder sell than it sounds, especially for an actress who could presumably coast on prestige dramas built to flatter rather than unsettle. Reinsve seems uninterested in that version of a career.

Taken together, a sister chasing her dead mother’s secrets across a volcanic island and a stranger lost in a corridor that shouldn’t exist say less about range for its own sake than about a specific appetite: for roles that leave an audience carrying something they haven’t fully processed on the walk out of the theater. That’s a much harder thing to build a career on than likability, and it’s the clearest throughline in everything she’s chosen for the year.

The comparison point for all of this is her performance in The Worst Person in the World, the role that made her an international name and earned her the best actress prize at Cannes. That film built its whole case around a character who resisted being pinned down, someone whose indecision about her own life was treated as a subject worth taking seriously rather than a flaw to be corrected by the end of the runtime. Seen against that history, Butterfly and Backrooms don’t look like a swerve so much as a continuation of the same instinct in more extreme registers, roles that refuse to resolve into someone easy to summarize in a festival blurb.

There’s a real risk in this strategy, and it’s worth not glossing over. Actors who follow a breakout with roles chosen for their difficulty rather than their appeal sometimes find the industry doesn’t reward the nerve the way film critics do; audiences build loyalty around a legible persona, and a deliberately illegible one can cost an actor the wider visibility that turns festival acclaim into a lasting career. Reinsve is betting that the version of longevity worth having is the one built on being hard to predict, not the one built on being easy to book, and that bet doesn’t always pay off, even for actors this good.

What makes the bet look smart rather than reckless, at least so far, is that both new roles ask for the same skill that won her the prize in the first place: sitting inside a feeling without hurrying it toward resolution. A horror project and a grief drama are different genres wearing the same instruction. Stay in the discomfort. Don’t perform the exit before you’ve actually found one. That’s a harder note to hit than range for its own sake, and it’s the one thing connecting every choice she’s made since the world started paying attention.