TIFF 2026: “THE JULIA SET” HAS A VERY SIMPLE EQUATION: SMART GIRL + FRAGILE MAN = DISASTER

One of the first things we learn about Julia Fischer (rising star Chase Infiniti) is that, despite her serious brain power, she has a tendency to pretend not to know the stuff she very, very much does. Julia’s T.A. Pascal (Christopher Briney, putting a dark edge on his The Summer I Turned Pretty charm) clocks this almost immediately in Niki Byrne’s The Julia Set, while trying to be both a) flirty and b) absolutely sure his word is gospel.

The Julia Set follows Julia, a college freshman and math prodigy who’d rather not make a whole thing out of being either. That gets harder once Pascal pulls her into an elite group training for the Putnam, an absurdly difficult undergraduate math competition, and takes an interest in her that quickly becomes more than academic. What starts as Julia finally finding people who can keep up with her brain soon gets tangled up with first love, competition and the unfortunate discovery that being able to solve an impossible equation does not mean you can recognize an increasingly bad situation before you’re already in it.

Julia’s got the kind of mathematical talent that should probably come with dramatic lighting every time she enters a classroom. Instead, she keeps it casual. She knows the answer, but waits. She sees the solution, but lets somebody else get there first. It’s not exactly false modesty. Being a genius isn’t easy — both real life and the movies love to tell us that — but it’s even harder when said genius isn’t even comfortable with the moniker.

Pascal, naturally, notices.

Suddenly Julia’s somewhere her brain isn’t an awkward party trick. Everyone around her is smart. Pascal is smart. More importantly, Pascal thinks she’s smart, which is a very effective way to get a teenager to overlook several upcoming problems.

And listen, I get it.

Pascal’s hot, intense and interested in the exact thing Julia’s spent years pretending isn’t a huge deal. Around him, she doesn’t have to act like knowing the answer is an accident or sand down her excitement so nobody feels weird about it. Julia already knows she’s good. She just likes being around someone who seems delighted that she is.

Of course, Pascal’s intentions are sketchier than Julia initially realizes. His admiration has limits. The more Julia starts matching — and then threatening — his own sense of brilliance, the uglier things get. And that difference between them is there from the start: she can tear through a math problem most people wouldn’t know how to begin, but she’s still a teenager figuring out what attention means, what intimacy is supposed to feel like and when somebody older and more experienced is taking advantage of the fact that she doesn’t know better yet. Again and again, Julia lands in situations where all that intelligence can’t really help her. She can solve for x. She cannot, apparently, solve for a man who keeps moving the variables.

And Julia makes some spectacularly bad calls. After a while, you stop caring quite so much about whether she wins the competition or finally admits exactly how talented she is. You’re just sitting there thinking, Girl, please get out of this.

Then there’s Anne (Gillian Anderson), Pascal’s mother, who seems to understand Julia almost immediately. Anne once had mathematical ambitions of her own, and being around Julia comes with the uneasy feeling of watching someone head toward a road you already know too well.

Infiniti really nails Julia’s contradictions. She is dry, guarded, cocky for half a second and then suddenly uncertain the moment somebody makes her feel like confidence is unbecoming. She doesn’t need Pascal to tell her she’s talented. She just likes how it feels when he isn’t threatened by it.

Until he is.

The Julia Set gets a little obvious once Pascal starts spiraling. Some red flags are waved so enthusiastically you half expect a marching band. More interesting is how Julia’s attachment to him survives well past the point when we’ve clocked exactly who he is. Sometimes the hardest relationships to leave aren’t the ones that make you feel worthless. They’re the ones that first made you feel unusually understood.

Julia doesn’t fall for Pascal because she’s naive. She falls for him because, for a minute, being around him feels like relief. And that’s exactly why watching that relief curdle into competition hurts so much.