The pivotal moment in “The Julia Set” arrives when Julia Fischer (Chase Infiniti) slips her notebook to her classmate Pascal (Christopher Briney) in their study group as their professor Nina Hoss is looking for anyone who could solve a most difficult equation. She should raise her own hand when she’s worked out the answer before anyone else, but the reason she likes math in the first place is the anonymity and after dating Pascal for a few weeks, she knows he’ll appreciate the opportunity to look good when he’s the son of a famed mathematician (a wonderfully smug Jason Isaacs) who has buildings on campus named after him and has far more need to impress than she does. (The fact he’s so readily willing to go along with it should be of concern, though it happens so fast, he can’t think much about it either.) Everyone gets what they want out of the situation, yet it still feels as if Julia has arrived at the wrong answer in letting someone else take credit for the right one.
It’s fitting that first-time writer/director Niki Byrne can show her own work a little too much at times in what otherwise is a whipsmart drama, following the burgeoning mathematician who is a bit afraid of her own talent. As Julia works out complex equations, she is a bit of one herself as someone content to stay out of the spotlight because of various factors, notably not out of any obvious social anxiety, but surely influenced by the fact there are few others that look like her in class as a young Black woman and attending a more modest choice than MIT or University of Chicago for that reason, though she’ll humbly say it was the best scholarship offer and she wanted to be closer to home without lying. Byrne unfortunately spoils one of the best one-liners in the movie by having someone actually spell out her other collegiate options when she modestly names only the cities she could’ve lived in instead, a symptom of not trusting an audience as much as she should at times, but few have considered the inhibiting nature of having inherent gifts quite like this, though the director should be quite proud of putting hers on full display.
Although Pascal appeals to Julia in calling themselves “two nerds,” “The Julia Set” resists a usual portrayal suggesting the two are outcasts, instead making math look sexy while finding a true connection over Algebra, yet while Julia’s interest in numbers developed organically with a stay-at-home mom (Carmen Ejogo) and an unseen father in construction work, Pascal has the pressure of living up to his father’s famous name. The relationship seems doomed from the start when Pascal is prone to fits of anger when he doesn’t have the facility with high-end equations that Julia does, but when she likes to make things work, the relationship extends past the point of being healthy for anyone with the looming spectre of a prestigious college competition on the horizon that Pascal is tabbed to compete in while Julia will sit on the sidelines. Although Julia is more than accepting, there is a real question whether she should be when she is a better person in all respects and her unbridled support of Pascal is stunting the growth of them both.
“The Julia Set” stumbles slightly out the gate as a whole when Pascal asks Julia to describe the well-known competition to him in a naked bit of exposition and his increasingly erratic behavior throughout may also be a bit on the nose, but Infiniti proves irresistible in the lead and as Byrne gives her more and more to show off Julia’s intelligence beyond arithmetic, the film becomes an undeniably rousing story of self-acceptance, aided along by endearing turns from Chloe Bailey as her roommate Erin and Gillian Anderson as Pascal’s long-suffering mother who gives a “You Go Girl!” speech for the ages. In the wrong hands, the empowerment tale could come across as hollow and trite, but in showing a real aptitude for both emotion and logic, “The Julia Set” has a winning formula.
“The Julia Set” does not yet have U.S. distribution.