Toronto film festival: the Oscar nominee makes for a compelling heroine in a solid and intermittently suspenseful tale of a professor stuck in a nightmare

The specific brilliance of Lesley Manville had been on display for those who knew where to look long before her first Oscar nomination. She’d been part of the enviable Mike Leigh troupe (her first nomination should have been for Another Year) and a permanent small-screen fixture, even if the size of her roles hadn’t correlated to the size of her talent. But after Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson’s singular magnum opus, Manville has enjoyed a spectacular boom, a long-deserved reward for her and an even bigger one for those of us watching.

The role came as she was entering her 60s, a period that can often leave female actors with grimly limited options, but she’s bucked the trend, not just through the sheer amount of work she’s found but also the unusual variety. She’s avoided the post-Book Club subgenre of mostly patronising comedies that squander older actors on pained pratfalls and found herself in far more interesting, and challenging, territory. She was a wife experiencing later stage sexual dissatisfaction in I Am Maria, a vicious Ma Barker type reigning over a North Dakota family of criminals in Let Him Go, a gun-toting ayahuasca-farming jungle doctor in Queer, the devious antagonist of the spy series Citadel, a cleaner turned fashionista in Mrs Harris Goes to Paris and an OnlyFans stripper in Ryan Murphy’s Grotesquerie. It’s hard to think of many post-Oscar recognition careers that have been quite so uniquely rewarding.

Winter of the Crow is screening at the Toronto film festival and is seeking distribution