Everyone wants something from Lauren Lane. Fame did that to her. The cameras loved her when she was a kid, and the country grew up with her as the heart of a family sitcom with a cozy soundstage and a laughing crowd. Think squeaky clean jokes and a comforting theme song, the sort of show that plays in the background of life and makes everyone feel safe. By the time we meet her in Trust, played by Sophie Turner, that cuddly image is nailed to her like a name tag. It is lovely, and it is a trap.
Then it all blows up in a flash. Hackers find a way into her life and ransack it. The ugly kind of violation. They dump private photos and contact information into the wild, and worst of all, they surface a single image that explodes across feeds and morning shows. A pregnancy test with two pink lines. That one detail turns a publicity crisis into a complete personal nightmare. It is not just a scandal. It is the end point of a long line of people deciding who she should be and what she is worth. The persona she has carried for other people is suddenly smashed into bits that everyone can pick through.
She tries to run. I do not blame her. She packs up her dog, a good sweet creature named Georgie, and she leaves town for a cabin that sits out near the coast. The ocean gives a feeling of space, but the trip is not restful. Her phone will not stop vibrating. The calls multiply like ants. Managers, publicists, reporters, high school lab partners she barely remembers, all of them reaching out with friendly voices and little nets. Shame follows her up the highway. She is alone in a room and not alone at all.
Then the film swerves. It becomes another thing. The place that looked like sanctuary is not a sanctuary. The rental is managed by someone who hides cameras in tiny places. The manager recognizes his guest. He tells himself he will protect her identity. He tells himself he is doing the right thing. Still, the information leaks sideways. His uncle hears a hint and sees a quick score, and he is not a man who wrestles with the weight of consequence. Darren, played with a ratty charm by Rhys Coiro, grabs a partner and heads out in the dark with simple plans. In through a window. Grab the shiny things. Back out before anyone notices.
It goes wrong. The dog scrambles away into the night. Lauren ducks into a boiler room and slams a door behind her and the lock clicks. For a while it becomes an escape picture. You watch the edges of a steel door and you study the gap at the threshold and you listen for footsteps on the other side. You hear the house breathe. That works. Tension settles like a fog. It is ugly, but it is clear. She is trapped. They are hunting. You sit with that for a bit and you feel your own shoulders curl inward.
But the movie will not sit still. It wants to be five things at once. In one moment it creeps along in the dark, and in the next it sprints down a different road. There is a hitman somewhere in the city, a contractor with a price and a method, and he has orders to find Lauren and make a problem vanish. That line is mean andcold. It could be a whole film on its own. Here, it keeps bumping into everything else.
Why the hitman at all. That question keeps chirping. The answer arrives like a sick thud. The father of Lauren’s child is the actor who played her father on the show. This is revealed early and not hidden. Billy Campbell plays Peter as a man who wrapped his public decency around a private rot and now fears the truth more than he fears his conscience. He groomed a girl while America laughed along with a studio audience. The part that hits the hardest is how casual his calculation feels. He talks about damage control, about not wanting to be exiled to a foreign house near a director who became a shorthand for a terrible era of looking the other way. He has spent years living off adoration, and he expects that to continue. It is not subtle, but it does not need to be. It is a wound. It should fester. It should drive the story.
That is the title, right. Trust. The trust we place in people who are supposed to protect us. The trust the audience gives a family friendly brand. The trust a child puts in the adults who run a set and guide a show and sign the checks. The trust a studio puts in a certain kind of story to keep the revenue smooth and the public smiling. The trust we have in cameras that are looking out for safety and not sneaking snapshots for profit. There is a version of this drama that digs into all of that and stays there like a diver who brought enough air. You can feel it under the surface.
Instead, we keep skidding off to the side. There is a whole thread with an animal rescuer named Loretta, played by Katey Sagal, who finds Georgie and gets starry eyed because the dog belongs to a famous person. She wanders in and out of stores and clinics with the pooch and a bright buzz. Her scenes tilt toward quirky. They are not hateful. They are a different show. It starts to feel like the film is flipping channels. You are watching Lauren clenched in a steel room and then you are at the checkout line with a charming side character who gets a lot of beats for what amounts to a detour.
There are little punctures like that everywhere. After a while the tone becomes slippery. Sometimes it wants laughs and sometimes it wants to grind you against the wall and sometimes it wants to hold your hand while you process a trauma. The shifts are not smooth. It is as if the script collected every interesting idea raised during a long coffee session and tossed them all onto one plate. The pieces jostle and argue for attention. The result is busy. It is not coherent.
Sophie Turner keeps the center as much as she can. Even when the narrative runs off to chase another subplot, you want to return to her. She carries a mix of anger and exhaustion that feels lived in. She knows how to let fear sit on her face without overplaying it. There are stretches where the camera simply watches her breathe and tries to steady itself, and those are the moments when the film remembers what it promised at the start. She gives it lungs and a pulse.
The real pity is that the strongest thread is also the one that gets the least sustained focus. The horror of having your privacy torn open is already potent. It is a violation that sticks to your skin. Add in the fact that Lauren was a child when the machine of fame first claimed her, and everything sharpens. The rules were never written for her safety. The adults who should have built her a safe lane instead built a marketplace. The story could have stayed tight on that line. Keep her in the cabin. Keep the world pounding on the door. Let the stalk of the hitman stay in the distance, if at all, like a storm cloud you can see from the porch. Let the theft attempt be a single burst that forces her to confront how even a private space is not private anymore. Then let the film stare at the fallout of a culture that consumes girls and sells them back their own faces.
There are flickers of that film. They arrive when the hidden cameras make the cabin feel haunted by invisible eyes. When she hears a footstep and you do not know if it is in the hall or inside her head. When a text arrives from a number that used to be a friend and now feels like a stranger. When the man who once played a dad on a soundstage speaks to her like she is a brand risk and not a person. Those beats carry weight. They sting. I wanted more of them and less of the jokey side quests and less of the late breaking guns for hire.
A word about the criminals who break into the cabin. Rhys Coiro gives Darren an oily charm that almost tricks you into liking him before you remember that he is breaking into a home because he knows a woman is alone inside. Forrest Goodluck plays the partner who does not seem fully tethered, a young man who could twist either way if someone with a stronger spine gave him a choice. They are interesting in a different movie. In this one they pull focus simply because their energy is big. The robbery thread is both scary and a bit cartoonish, and the mix leaves an odd aftertaste.
As for the hitman thread, it muddies the water. Not because the idea is inherently weak, but because it belongs in a colder, leaner story that only cares about the chess moves between predator and target. This film wants compassion for Lauren and critique for the industry that shaped her and a thriller engine to push the night forward. All of that together proves too much. The presence of a paid killer reframes the stakes in a way that does not serve the smaller, more human panic that had already been working.
I kept thinking about what the title really asked us to consider. Trust is what we give and what is taken when we are not looking. It sits in the contract between an actor and an audience. We believe the smiles. We believe the dad on the couch and the daughter at the kitchen table with a mug of cocoa and a tidy life lesson. We leave the episode believing in a safe world. Lauren knows that illusion better than any of us and has lived with the cost of maintaining it for years. When the film stares at that contradiction, it cuts close to the bone. When it looks away, it loses heat.
There is also the larger cultural mood swirling around the edges. The appetite of celebrity is not just about adoration. It is about consumption. People want access. They want receipts. They want to know a person’s private business because it makes them feel closer or because it gives them something to talk about while waiting for the bus. The leak of the pregnancy test is particularly cruel for that reason. It turns a private choice into a spectacle and puts a timer on her body in public view. The film seems to know that this is the beating heart of its story. It brings up the cruelty and then keeps wandering off to juggle a gun or a joke.
Carlson Young directs with an eye for a certain pall of dread when she lets it breathe. The cabin has corners that feel wrong. The night air outside hums with a threat you cannot quite name. When the frame tightens around Lauren in that cramped boiler room, you feel the iron. The choices in those passages suggest a filmmaker who understands how to let tension earn its own momentum. Then the cut jerks to a different mode and the spell breaks. That back and forth is the overall experience in miniature.
Gigi Levangie’s script cracks open a handful of themes that deserve attention. Childhood stardom and the adults who see it as a gold mine. The ridiculous speed at which online shame can chase someone into hiding. The ugly ways power protects itself. The complicated decision of whether to carry a pregnancy and why that should not be a public debate in the hands of strangers, let alone a cause for violence. These are not small topics. They deserve room. The film gives each of them a corner and then moves on before the paint dries.
One could argue that real life is messy too, and that chaos suits a story about a woman stuck in a social hurricane. Maybe. But art needs its own order even when the subject is disorder. You can feel the movie trying to find it and not quite getting there. Scenes that should talk to each other are separated by comic beats that do not match the temperature of the room. Scenes that should simmer are rushed so another thread can get its turn. The balance never settles.
What works, works because Turner refuses to let Lauren become a symbol. She plays a person who is tired and stubborn and hurt and still able to make a choice in the next minute even after the last minute went badly. There is one look she gives after a smaller character tries to reduce her to a headline. It is not a big acting moment. It is just a quiet death of patience that tells you how many times she has had to swallow something unspeakable. The film would be stronger if it trusted that look more and its moving pieces less.
Katey Sagal brings warmth to the animal rescuer. If you wanted that warmth in a lighter picture about a dog who accidentally becomes famous, it would be a delight. Here it makes you feel like you changed channels without permission. Billy Campbell hits the right queasy tone for Peter, which is to say he makes your skin crawl. He should. The character is the scariest thing in the story because he is the most ordinary kind of monster. He hides in manners and nostalgia. He could stand behind you in line at a coffee shop and you might compliment his sweater.
The more I think about Trust, the more I see a good movie trapped inside an overeager one. The good movie is simple. A woman has her private life stolen and goes somewhere quiet to catch a breath. She discovers that quiet places are not quiet anymore. The cameras never blink. The men who once cheered for her have always had a hand on the lever of her life and they have no intention of letting go now. She fights back, not with fists or elaborate schemes, but by refusing to be silent. She names what happened. She insists on being a person and not a brand. She builds a circle of true allies around her and cuts out the rot. That movie is right there on the table.
Trust wants to be that movie and a half dozen others. You can feel the impulses of a brainstorming session. What if the handyman has a secret. What if a neighbor has a connection to the dog. What if the villain hires someone. What if the getaway goes wrong. Some of these ideas could work, but not all at once and not without a firm spine. No one seems to have been ruthless about trimming the list down.
Even so, there are things here that give me hope for the folks behind it. The eye for small human detail is present when the noise drops away. The sense of how modern fame corrodes an ordinary life feels lived and not borrowed from headlines. Turner is clearly hungry for roles that let her push into darker and more complicated corners, and she proves she can carry a story even when the story cannot carry itself.
If the film had built itself around the bedrock of violated privacy and the long shadow of a childhood role, it could have been both a sharp thriller and a pointed study of power. Imagine a version that keeps us locked in the cabin with Lauren and parcels out information the way real panic does. Imagine how the theme of trust could have turned into a series of choices about which call to answer and which door to open and which memory to revisit. Keep the camera close. Let the outside world bang and buzz. Force us to live with her.
As it stands, Trust is uneven. It has energy and moments that snap. It also has long digressions and tonal leaps that jar you out of the spell. The story does not decide which drumbeat to follow. When it leans into the horror of being watched and cornered, it holds you tight. When it tries to juggle wit and menace and social critique in the same minute, it drops the balls.
There is a line near the end of my notes that I circled. Stay with Lauren. That is the whole thing. She is the promise of the movie. She is the wound and the strength. She is the person we need to understand. When the film does that, it breathes. When it does not, it goes under.
So yes, everyone wants a piece of Lauren Lane. The problem is that her own story gets chopped up right along with her. Cut away the extra and what remains is painful and powerful. That is the version I wish I had seen. Maybe next time. I hope there is a next time, because the core here is worth the risk. And because we deserve stories that know exactly who they are standing with and why.
