Trust: Sophie Turner in a poorly executed survival thriller

Young actress Lauren Lane is in the midst of a potentially devastating media scandal for her career: a star of a successful television series, she was hacked, resulting in a leak of personal information, including private messages and a positive pregnancy test. Who is the father? The tabloids go wild, social media savages her, and to recover from the uproar, she decides to take refuge in an isolated house near a wooded area outside the city.

In Trust, the serenity she sought with her beloved dog is, however, threatened by a gang of improvised criminals who assault the dwelling in search of easy money. But that's not the only danger she'll have to defend herself from; in fact, someone very close to her also intends to silence her to avoid being dragged down with her. Without knowing who she can truly trust, Lauren will have to try to escape danger with her own strength alone. 

Trust: A Matter of Trust

Carlson Young's second feature film, after the mediocre The Blazing World (2021) and the more recent rom-com Upgraded (2024), is the actress's attempt, having moved behind the camera, to establish a personal voice in genre cinema. A gamble that, from the outset, concealed many unknowns, especially due to a script that doesn't have many arrows in its quiver. An isolated villa, a protagonist assaulted by bad men, providential secondary figures ready to force her hand to give her more or less providential help in her time of need.

Especially for a plot of this type, which relies heavily on the dramatic intensity of someone who finds themselves an hypothetical victim, a talented and credible performer is needed, which, at least on this occasion, cannot be said of Sophie Turner. The former Sansa from Game of Thrones and future Lara Croft in the announced new Tomb Raider series, lacks the necessary dramatic verve for these survival-movie dynamics, and very often her limited expressiveness risks falling into unintentional ridicule, relying more on physicality than on a humoral variety of tones and undertones.

It must be said to her detriment that the narrative material for her character was truly at an all-time low, with the storyline related to her pregnancy appearing, to say the least, improbable, even in an ambiguous world like that of the Hollywood star system.

Everything Too Simple

And what about the use of the dog as a device to steer the story towards the final showdown? The script is never realistic, constantly sketching out developments that have little to do with logic and coherence, while our protagonist finds herself grappling with her desperate mission for survival. The ineptitude of the police and a specially hired hitman, who should be infallible but also turns out to have a below-average IQ, only complete a desolate narrative picture, where at least some sporadic self-deprecating forays try to mitigate the damage.

The model is undoubtedly Panic Room (2002), with Lauren's character hiding in that boiler room, an apparently protected place, just as Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart did in the safe room in David Fincher's cult film. But if there the tension remained constantly at very high levels, in Trust there are multiple occasions to check the clock to find out how much is left of the hour and a half of viewing, a short duration but still excessive for what is actually staged.