All 10 Best Jessie Buckley Movies Ranked (Best to Worst)

Maggie Gyllenhaal's directorial debut cuts straight to the marrow of maternal taboo, framing motherhood not as an instinctual sanctuary, but as an overwhelming psychic assault. Shot with suffocating sunlit intimacy on a Greek island, the film bifurcates its protagonist's conscience across two timelines, allowing past repressions to bleed mercilessly into the present. Buckley handles the younger version of Olivia Colman's Leda with astonishing ferocity. She plays parental exhaustion not with romanticized patience, but with jittery, feral panic and intellectual starvation. It is a performance devoid of vanity, capturing the quiet horror of a woman suffocating under domestic duty, rightfully earning Buckley her first Academy Award nomination and cementing her status as an elite screen tragedian.

Confined almost entirely to a sunlit hayloft, Sarah Polley's adaptation of Miriam Toews' novel transforms a horrific real-world tragedy into an urgent, philosophical crucible. The film operates as an intellectual chamber piece, where Mennonite women debate whether to forgive, fight, or flee after suffering systemic assaults by the colony's men. Buckley delivers the production's most volatile, razor-sharp energy as Mariche. While others debate theology with measured philosophical grace, she bristles with defensive cynicism and visceral rage, bearing the physical and emotional bruises of domestic abuse. Her eventual cathartic breakdown anchors the film's intellectual debates in raw, bleeding emotional reality, providing the ideological core that elevates this ensemble into cinematic history.

Adapted from Iain Reid's novel, Charlie Kaufman crafts an icy, disintegrating nightmare centered around a winter road trip to meet an estranged family on a desolate farm. Time slips, architectural dimensions distort, and dialogue mutates into an echo chamber of recycled cultural ephemera and existential dread. As the unnamed young woman, Buckley delivers a staggering technical achievement, shifting names, vocations, and personalities across fleeting conversational turns. She grounds Kaufman's cerebral labyrinth with biting wit and deep melancholy, ensuring the audience feels the profound loneliness fueling the hallucination. Her recitation of Eva H.D.'s poetry remains one of the most haunting sustained monologues in modern American cinema.

Tom Harper's Glasgow-set drama avoids standard musical biopic clichés by treating its protagonist's creative ambition as both a gift and an abrasive social hazard. Fresh out of prison with an ankle monitor and two young children, Rose-Lynn Harlan dreams of Nashville stardom while clashing with her pragmatic mother. Buckley commands the screen with infectious, unapologetic ferocity, balancing genuine working-class friction with staggering vocal authority. Rather than sanding down Rose-Lynn's selfishness to make her palatable, she leans directly into the character's messy, self-sabotaging instincts. The climactic performance of 'Glasgow (No Place Like Home)' acts as the definitive arrival of Buckley's raw, unvarnished star power.

Chloé Zhao's adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's celebrated novel reframes Elizabethan history around Agnes Hathaway, the enigmatic wife of William Shakespeare coping with the sudden death of their young son. The production eschews dusty academic theatricality, leaning into naturalistic light, pagan folklore, and tactile rural labor to depict the devastating domestic hollow left behind by pestilence. Buckley carries the film's tragic weight on her shoulders, crafting an earthbound, fiercely protective mother communing with nature and mourning an unimaginable loss. Her wordless expressions of maternal anguish supply the thematic architecture for Hamlet's inception, proving once again that she thrives when excavating profound, unspoken interior pain.

The quiet seaside community of Littlehampton becomes a battleground of social repression in Thea Sharrock's period comedy, which chronicles an absurd true-life poison-pen letter scandal in 1920s England. Beneath the ribald comedy lies a sharp critique of post-war Victorian morality, puritanical shame, and institutional police incompetence. Buckley revels in the chaos as Rose Gooding, an irreverent, brassy Irish migrant scapegoated by her devout neighbor. Sharing exquisite comic friction with Olivia Colman, Buckley infuses the profanity-laced dialogue with infectious rhythmic swagger while protecting the character's bruised dignity as a fiercely loving mother defying xenophobic hypocrisy.

Rupert Goold's glossy biopic chronicles Judy Garland's tragic, chaotic final residency at London's Talk of the Town in 1968, spotlighting the destructive collision between showbiz exploitation and chemical dependency. While the film explicitly functions as an awards vehicle for Renée Zellweger, the narrative gains its domestic anchor through the British production assistant assigned to keep the star functional. Buckley plays Rosalyn Wilder with restrained compassion and steely professional competence, resisting sentimental indulgence. By underplaying her scenes, she offers a quiet, grounded perspective on the insanity of celebrity worship, acting as a crucial dramatic counterweight to Zellweger's theatrical, Oscar-winning excess.

Dominic Cooke's Cold War espionage thriller plays out with gray-toned, old-school tension, tracking British businessman Greville Wynne as he smuggles Soviet nuclear secrets out of Moscow to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis. The film prioritizes ordinary human decency and psychological dread over explosive spy theatrics. Buckley portrays Sheila Wynne, a woman caught between conventional suburban domesticity and mounting suspicions regarding her husband's secret double life. Though constrained by the archetypal mid-century 'worried wife' blueprint, Buckley elevates her scenes through shrewd emotional intelligence, transforming a potentially flat supporting role into a poignant portrait of marital loyalty strained by geopolitical terror.

Alex Garland's provocative folk horror traps a grieving widow inside a picturesque Cotswolds village, only to subject her to escalating psychological and physical terror from an interchangeable parade of local men. The film's bold metaphorical structure divides audiences, trading narrative realism for surrealist body horror and overt symbolism about ancestral male violence. Buckley shoulders the intense atmospheric dread with exceptional physical commitment as Harper. She portrays grief not as quiet resignation, but as a hyper-vigilant, exhausted defense mechanism, meeting grotesque generational monstrosities with steely defiance even when the script loses its structural footing in a chaotic third act.

Stephen Donnelly's computer-animated reimagining of Charles Dickens' holiday fable injects supernatural psychedelia, vibrant musical numbers, and fast-paced slapstick into the traditional Victorian redemption arc. While visually energetic, the musical adaptations of Leslie Bricusse's classic tunes frequently tilt into sensory overload, sacrificing Dickens' cold moral austerity for modern pacing. Buckley lends her rich, expressive singing voice to Isabel Fezziwig, Scrooge's lost love. Her radiant vocal delivery provides the film with its brief flashes of genuine emotional warmth, yet the role remains a modest, voice-booth divertissement within an otherwise relentlessly stylized and routine seasonal diversion.