Laura Linney’s Oscar Campaign for Hulu’s ‘Suncoast’ Starts Now

I’m just going to say it: Laura Linney deserves an Academy Award for her performance in the new coming-of-age drama, Suncoast, which began streaming on Hulu today.

Yes, the 2024 Oscars ceremony is still over a month away. Yes, awards season is already insufferably drawn-out, without the added annoyance of thinking about 2025 Oscars in February 2024. Believe me, I hate to be the person putting out Christmas decorations on Halloween. But Linney has forced my hand. She’s just that good.

Suncoast is a Searchlight Pictures film that premiered at Sundance Film Festival last month. Based on Chinn’s childhood, the movie stars Nico Parker as Doris, who longs to be a normal teenager. But nothing about Doris’s life is normal. For the last 10 years, she’s been caring for her terminally ill brother, Max. Max, no longer able to move or speak on his own, has finally reached the end of his life, and will spend his remaining days in a hospice care facility in Florida, Suncoast. It just so happens that it’s the exact same facility where Terri Schiavo—a real-life, landmark right-to-die court case in the early 2000s—is staying.

Linney stars as Doris and Max’s mother, Kristine. Kristine’s anticipatory grief over losing her first-born child is insurmountable, and Linney channels it all into a barely-contained rage that she readily unleashes on anyone who isn’t her mute, motionless son. That goes double for her 17-year-old daughter, for whom Kristine has not one ounce of affection. Kristine’s entire world revolves around her dying child, and she has no patience for Doris’s mundane concerns, like getting to school on time or the state of her hair. In one particularly telling scene, Kristine barks at her daughter to, “Get up, I need your chair,” because she needs to adjust something in Max’s hospice room. Kristine expects Doris to give up everything for her brother’s comfort.

Kristine is, in other words, a terrible mother to Doris, and Linney is so very good at being bad. As Kristin, she’s uncompromising and formidable. While you’ll cringe in sympathy every time she directs her ire on her daughter, you’ll cheer when she does it to a poor, hapless cop. Laura Linney will not be bullied into following arbitrary rules, just because some guy in a uniform said so. She’s deliciously lethal as she offers the cop fake, simpering praise, calling him “my hero,” when he searches her car. I laughed out loud when she drawled to him, “I have to get to work at the bomb factory, where I make hospice bombs,” her voice dripping with sarcasm. If Laura Linney ever obliterated me like that, I wouldn’t even be mad. I’d just feel honored.

Eventually, Kristine’s mask of nastiness does crack, and we see the real, raw grief that lives underneath. Linney, unsurprisingly, kills this too. She and Parker (who is the 19-year-old daughter of actor Thandiwe Newton and screenwriter Ol Parker) play off each other beautifully, especially in the heart-wrenching scene where Kristine finally offers her daughter the comfort and validation she so desperately needs. There won’t be a dry eye in the house.

Linney, who recently turned 60, has been nominated for three Academy Awards in her career—for You Can Count on Me (2000), Kinsey (2004), and The Savages (2007)—but she’s never taken home a win. While the timing of the film’s release isn’t ideal, Suncoast could be her well-deserved Oscar-reel moment. That’s why, annoying as it may be, we have to start campaigning for Linney at the 2025 Oscars now. Do it for Laura Linney.