“The Actor” (2025) feels like a Charlie Kaufman script directed by Damien Chazelle. It is bittersweet, charming, and immersive like a Chazelle film that lingers in your mind long after, but it follows a dreamlike logic and revels in its inherent absurdity like a Kaufman script. Somehow, their distinct styles coalesce in Duke Johnson’s surrealistic mystery film to offer a captivating confusion. It constantly puts its protagonist, Paul Cole (André Holland), at odds with himself. After waking up from an accident, he learns that he was beaten up for sleeping with a married woman. He loses most of his memories.

The husband shows no mercy to this man and throws him out. Suddenly, he finds himself stranded in a small town with no one to call his own. He enters with no recollection of the life he had led till then. He only vaguely recalls someone calling him ‘an actor’ in the hospital.