‘The Accompanist’ Review [A-] Tribeca Festival

The Office actor Zach Woods makes his directorial feature debut with The Accompanist, premiering in the Tribeca Festival Spotlight Narrative section. It’s an often hilarious but also shattering account of a preteen girl fitfully adjusting to foster care. Featuring Susan Sarandon and Aubrey Plaza in supporting roles, the film is ultimately less about the foster system than the emotional burdens children inherit from the adults around them.

We first meet 9-year-old Emily (Everly Carganilla) as she emerges expressionlessly from a horde of spinning adults at a roller rink. Back at home, as she wipes off the purple face paint and applies a Band-Aid to her scraped up knee, we notice a remote control tucked inside the medicine cabinet. Just in case that’s too subtle a clue, Woods gently reinforces the point with a Post-it reminder to turn off the stove, driving home the fact that Emily’s grandfather Martin (Kevyn Morrow), her intended caregiver, has dementia.

Long before she enters foster care, Emily has already become the adult in the room. She monitors Martin’s well-being, responds calmly to his confusion, and carries herself with the vigilance of someone much older. Childhood, for her, appears less like a stage of life than a luxury she can scarcely afford.

In the next scene, Martin is out driving with Emily riding shotgun. Just as you begin to wonder whether this is a flashback or whether he should be behind the wheel at all, he inexplicably turns onto a set of railroad tracks. Of course, he does so moments before the bell begins to chime and the crossing gates start to lower. Emily immediately tries to get both of them to abandon the vehicle, but her panicked warnings only seem to confuse and paralyze Martin. Though we’ve only just met them, we are already much more invested in their survival than that of Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor when they find themselves in a similar bind midway through Disclosure Day.

Shaken by the incident, Emily visits the school nurse in hopes of procuring medicine that might improve Martin’s condition. Instead, Child Protective Services caseworker Sarah (Plaza) soon arrives at their door. Again, upsetting Martin only exacerbates his condition, and Sarah is forced to drag Emily away in a scene that resembles a kidnapping more than a rescue. When she is dropped off at the home of Sylvia (Sarandon), Emily obstinately refuses to go inside and wanders off to a nearby park. Sylvia takes a laissez-faire approach, perhaps recognizing that Emily’s resistance isn’t a tantrum to be defeated but a weather system to be waited out. After they spend the night camping in the park, Emily finally agrees to accept Sylvia’s invitation home for breakfast.

Though Carganilla already has more than a dozen credits to her name, there is something refreshingly unorthodox about her performance. She never once strikes as an overeager showbiz kid. She seems natural in the unpolished, unadorned sense of the word. Instead of preciously charming the audience, she bolts up and shuts off. Sarandon’s Sylvia gradually earns Emily’s trust through humor, patience, and a bit of mischief, just as the film itself slowly disarms any skepticism in the audience.

After both Sylvia and the film succeed in lowering our defenses, The Accompanist takes an unexpectedly dark turn. The film’s opening scene, in which Sylvia’s estranged daughter performs an emotionally charged interpretive dance, foreshadows wounds that have never fully healed. Sylvia remains haunted by what went wrong while raising her daughter and is increasingly consumed by guilt, regret, and self-recrimination.

What makes The Accompanist unusually affecting is its understanding of how children misread adult pain. Emily doesn’t merely witness Sylvia’s unraveling, she absorbs it. Like many children, she assumes herself to be the common denominator in every emotional equation. Woods recognizes a truth movies rarely articulate: children often lack the context necessary to understand adult unhappiness. They only feel its temperature. As Sylvia revisits her perceived failures as a mother, Emily internalizes those mood swings as evidence of her own shortcomings.

The tragedy is that foster placement never actually relieves Emily of the burden she has carried. It merely transfers it. Where Martin required practical caretaking, Sylvia requires emotional caretaking. Throughout the film, Emily repeatedly finds herself managing feelings and crises that belong to other people. Woods’s great insight is that children are often asked to shoulder responsibilities they cannot possibly comprehend.

This realization leaves us torn. We know Sylvia has been a generous and loving foster mother, yet we also recognize how even fleeting moments of guilt, resentment, or self-loathing can leave permanent impressions on a child. The film refuses easy moral judgments. Sylvia is neither villain nor saint but a deeply scarred person whose acts of love arrive tangled up with wounds of her own.

Though Sarandon has become associated as much with political activism as acting in recent years, she has here received a role worthy of her considerable gifts. Her whimsical, deeply vulnerable performance may very well rank among the finest of her career. She elevates this modest but compassionate story about foster care into something far more resonant: a devastating conversation starter about generational trauma, caregiving, and the emotional labor children quietly perform every day.

Beyond its hard-fought closure, The Accompanist reminds us that children should never be saddled with adults’ baggage. Yet Woods also understands how frequently that burden is passed down despite everyone’s best intentions.

Grade: A-

This review is from the 2026 Tribeca Festival where The Accompanist had its world premiere.