Let's Talk About..Mia McKenna-Bruce in "How to Have Sex"
A write-up on one of the year's best performances thus far.
Often, a performance will come from an actor who comes out of almost nowhere and stuns you to the point where you immediately wonder what their next move is. One that, after the film is over, has you sensing the actor giving it will be huge as soon as you leave the theater.
Some instances where that happened to me were when I exited The Wolf of Wall Street thinking Margot Robbie would become a bigger deal and walked out of my screening of Lady Macbeth proclaiming, “She’s gonna be a star!” after witnessing Florence Pugh’s magnetic leading turn. Also, while he wasn’t an unknown, it’s no coincidence that after he flashed his billion-dollar smile in the blockbuster hit Top Gun: Maverick, Glen Powell transitioned from a supporting player into a certified leading man.
Mia McKenna-Bruce as Tara in Molly Manning Walker’s feature directorial debut “How to Have Sex.” (Photo courtesy of MUBI)
The latest performance to fall into that trend is Mia McKenna-Bruce in How to Have Sex, which finally hits US theaters this week after making its way through the festival circuit last year. After seeing the film at a Toronto International Film Festival screening, I was immediately awe-struck by the filmmaking and the simplistic final scene. But most of all, Mia McKenna-Bruce’s performance struck me. Although McKenna-Bruce has been in the acting scene since 2006, having worked heavily on television, How to Have Sex feels like her big arrival.
In How to Have Sex, McKenna-Bruce plays Tara, a student on vacation with her friends on the island of Crete. Hoping to have the best summer of their lives, engaging in clubbing and hooking up, complications arise after Tara is sexually assaulted. Leading up to that moment, McKenna-Bruce carries the film with poise and charm, presenting an aura that masks Tara’s hidden insecurities about her incoming exam scores and being the only virgin among her friends. Although her friends prod her about her virginity in jest, Tara still alludes to feelings of self-consciousness.
Once the incident occurs and Tara’s buoyant facade drops, McKenna-Bruce is left to transcribe Tara’s thought process while hardly saying a word. We can see in her eyes how Tara is paralyzed by what happened and unsure how to tell those around her. In the film’s most harrowing sequence after the incident, Tara’s assaulter, Paddy (Samuel Bottomley), jumps into her bed to make further sexual advances. Besides the closed-in cinematography by Nicolas Cannicionni that reflects Tara’s feelings of being caged, the confined look on McKenna-Bruce’s face sells the moment’s distress.
As discomforting as How to Have Sex may be, it remains a vital view about the importance of consent and the perils of peer pressure, with Mia McKenna-Bruce’s spellbinding performance at its center that keeps you glued to the screen. She is charismatic yet shatteringly fragile even with just a glance, and one can only hope big things are on the horizon for the recently-anointed BAFTA Rising Star Award nominee.