Kate Lyn Sheil Is a Perfect Actor Who Deserves Your Attention

By Matt Mahler

Sheil stars in the new film, The Seeding, but has an immaculate career worthy of your attention. She’s the best.

Kate Lyn Sheil is a one-of-a-kind actor, like one of those rare lunar events you better grab the telescope for, lest you wait 60 years for that true blue moon. From her early mumblecore days when she seemed the Anna Karina to Joe Swanberg’s Godard, or the Michelle Williams to Amy Seimetz’s Kelly Reichardt, through intense horror films, myriad shorts, and quirky dramedies, Sheil has made a career out of tipping scales. A good film becomes very good when she crosses over, and great becomes greater.
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Perhaps the greatest instance of this is in Rick Alverson’s masterpiece, The Comedy, perhaps the apotheosis of ironic detachment. Starring the brilliant comedian Tim Heidecker in one of the most stunning dramatic performances given by any comedic talent, the film follows a wealthy man-child lost in the depths of anhedonia. He is constantly searching for a feeling, often going to disturbingly uncomfortable lengths to try and capture one, insulting cab drivers, acting like an idiot in a church, and generally disrupting people’s lives.
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As is evident, [Joe Swanberg’s] Full Moon trilogy is very much about the art of acting and the fiction of filmmaking (with acting as a kind of lycanthropy). It’s an interesting facet of Sheil’s career, a kind of meta tendency toward self-reflexive trickery. Of course, some of this is because of the family affair of mumblecore, where actors and directors blended into each other, often making movies about themselves. Swanberg and Seimetz, Lawrence Michael Levine, Kentucker Audley, Lena Dunham, Sophia Takal, Ti West, Jane Adams, Larry Fessenden — they were all starring in and directing each other’s films (while Gerwig, Bujalski, Duplass, and Duplass were doing the same, mostly elsewhere). It was a truly special time in cinema that feels sadly over.
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Read full tribute at Movieweb

Fessenden appears with Sheil in YOU’RE NEXT and SILVER BULLETS. THE COMEDY is a Glass Eye Pix production featuring Sheil. Sheil performs in the TALES FROM BEYOND THE PALE episode “The Stranger.” And as always there have been unrealized collaborations too.