DANCES WITH FILMS 2026 REVIEW! Jonathan Oster’s Jane’s Not Here is built around a terrifying question: what happens when the life you remember is the one nobody else believes? It’s a psychological thriller about identity and memory, and the possibility that the people who love you most might still be completely wrong about who you are.
Anna has a husband, a son, and a life she loves. Then she wakes up in a hospital bed. Three months have passed since a deadly train crash, and the woman lying there isn’t Anna; she’s Jane (Amelia Barr), a single woman with no husband, no son, and an estranged brother named Brady (Steve Mallers) sitting at her bedside. Doctors and family tell her the same thing: Michael and Tommy never existed — just a vivid dream she had while in a coma. But Jane swears they did.
Jane is so adamant that she is Anna that she refuses to eat, blows off physical therapy, and stays silent during therapy sessions. Brady finally loses patience and demands she play the game if she ever hopes to get out of the hospital. So Jane stops arguing and starts performing. It works, and Jane is released to live with Brady, Abby (Nicole Weber), and their son, Dylan (Teddy Marriott), where she settles into an uneasy routine, quietly burying the other version of herself.
But Anna keeps surfacing. Jane discovers she hates pineapples now because Anna hated pineapples. She somehow knows the words to bedtime stories she’s never read to Dylan, as bedtime reading is something Jane never did. The more she leans into Brady’s world, the more pieces of Anna’s life press through. When Jane starts digging into the train crash, the PTSD hits hard, and so do the clues — evidence that the life she remembers is full of memories that will not go away.
Jonathan Oster wrote Jane’s Not Here while grieving the death of his father, shot it while awaiting the birth of his daughter, and edited it during her first months of life. At its core, Oster says, this is a story about the love a parent has for a child — a force powerful enough to survive grief, loss, and everything that tries to tear it apart. Inspired by the Danish Dogme 95 movement, he stripped the production down to its essentials — a crew of five, raw cinematography, a subtle score. He wanted nothing to get between the audience and the emotion. The mystery is the hook, but the heart of Jane’s Not Here is family; the people who keep us grounded when we can’t trust our own minds.
“Doctors and family tell her the same thing: Michael and Tommy never existed — just a vivid dream she had while in a coma. But Jane swears they did.”
Jane’s Not Here is a mystery box movie, and director Jonathan Oster does an incredible job of keeping you off-kilter for the entire runtime. It would be easy to just lay out the facts — Jane is Jane, here’s the proof, case closed. That’s not how this story is told. There’s always doubt. Things start to unfold as the film moves along, but they don’t fully click into place until the final moments, which means I was engaged from start to finish.
Amelia Barr is fantastic as Jane. She plays a woman who the world sees as Jane, but deep down, she knows she’s Anna. That tension lives in every scene — who is wrong and who is right…or can both be true at the same time? Barr keeps Jane just slightly off-kilter throughout, because no matter what Jane does or says, Anna’s memories and thoughts keep creeping in. The facts about Anna become harder and harder to dismiss until they simply can’t be ignored.
What makes Jane’s Not Here work is that it is an actor’s story. There’s a great deal of emotion boiling under the surface at all times, and Barr carries it with an edge and desperation that never lets up. Jonathan Oster trusts his actors to do the heavy lifting, and they deliver.
Jane’s Not Here is a quiet, confident thriller that earns every bit of its mystery. Jonathan Oster has made a film that lingers — not because of what it finally reveals, but because of how it makes you feel getting there.
Jane’s Not Here screened at the 2026 Dances with Films.
"…Barr carries it with an edge and desperation that never lets up."
