Top 13 Sydney Sweeney Movies, Ranked

There’s a version of Sydney Sweeney’s career where she stays in prestige TV forever, collecting acclaim for Euphoria and never quite making the leap to theatrical movie star. That version didn’t happen. Instead, she’s spent the last few years proving that the big screen suits her just fine, and the TV Hulk team has ranked her film performances based on one thing: how much the performance itself grabbed us, whether through raw emotional commitment, physical daring, or the kind of screen presence you simply can’t look away from. From early indie credits to a $220 million rom-com, here are her 13 best movies, ranked.

13. Big Time Adolescence (2019)

Holly isn’t a role built to impress anyone. She’s a supporting player in a coming-of-age story that belongs mostly to Pete Davidson and Griffin Gluck, and Sweeney plays her with an easy, lived-in warmth that fits the film’s low-key charm perfectly. What she does well here is stay completely grounded while the movie around her leans into its more comedic moments. There’s a naturalness to how she moves through scenes that makes Holly feel like a real person rather than a plot device, and for a performer still building her film resume, that kind of quiet, unshowy work is genuinely valuable. Holly reveals something interesting about Sweeney — that her instinct in ensemble material is to serve the scene rather than herself, which is a harder thing to pull off than it looks.

12. Under the Silver Lake (2018)

Sweeney’s appearance in David Robert Mitchell’s paranoid LA fever dream is brief enough that you could miss it if you blink at the wrong moment. As Shooting Star, she floats through the film’s hazy, conspiratorial atmosphere with an almost ethereal quality that fits the movie’s strange wavelength perfectly. There isn’t much for her to do in terms of traditional acting, but she understands the assignment completely: this is a film about surfaces and symbols, and she inhabits that world without overselling it. The most telling moment is how she holds eye contact with Andrew Garfield’s Sam just a beat too long before looking away — no smile, no explanation, just enough to make him (and you) feel like you’ve missed something important.

11. Night Teeth (2021)

Eva is cold, predatory, and genuinely a little frightening, and Sweeney leans into every bit of that. As the sharper, more menacing half of a vampire duo terrorizing Los Angeles, she plays the role with a flat, almost bored cruelty that makes her more unsettling than any amount of theatrical hissing would. There’s a scene where she turns on the charm for a mark and then drops it completely, the warmth vanishing from her face like a light switching off, and it’s the most effective moment in the film. Night Teeth is mostly style over substance, a Netflix genre exercise that doesn’t fully commit to its own premise, but that light-switch drop — the way her eyes go completely empty mid-sentence — is the kind of physical choice that sticks with you.

10. Americana (2025)

Penny Jo Poplin demands a loose, almost loping physicality from Sweeney — scrappier and stranger than anything she’s played before — and this quirky crime-western ensemble gives her room to fully commit to it. She keeps Penny Jo’s jaw slightly slack and her shoulders perpetually rolled forward, like someone who’s never once stood at full height, and that posture does more character work than most actors manage with dialogue. She’s best in the small moments: there’s a scene where she delivers a throwaway line with a crooked half-smile, weight shifting off her back foot like she couldn’t care less, and somehow that carelessness lands harder than any big dramatic swing could. Sweeney disappears into Penny Jo so completely you stop tracking the performance and just watch the person.

9. The Voyeurs (2021)

Pippa starts the film as a curious, slightly guilty observer and ends it somewhere much darker, and Sweeney commits to every step of that descent. The Voyeurs is a shameless, Rear Window-adjacent erotic thriller that knows exactly what it is, and rather than playing it at arm’s length, she throws herself into the pulpy material with a wide-eyed intensity that makes the whole thing work better than it has any right to. The moment where Pippa’s voyeurism tips from passive fascination into active obsession is handled with a physical restlessness that keeps the performance grounded even as the plot spirals. Films like this build cult followings precisely because an actor went all in, and Sweeney absolutely did.

8. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

Snake is barely a role in the traditional sense. She appears in a handful of Spahn Ranch scenes as one of the Manson Family members, and her screen time could be measured in minutes. What Sweeney does in those brief moments is carry the eerie, cult-member blankness those sequences need without tipping into caricature — there’s a particular stillness in the way she watches Rick Dalton’s car roll onto the ranch, eyes tracking it with flat, unreadable calm, that lands exactly right. That dead-eyed tracking shot is the thing you keep turning over afterward.

7. Nocturne (2020)

Juliet Lowe is the role that early Sweeney fans point to when they want to explain what they saw coming. In this slow-burn psychological thriller from Amazon’s horror anthology, she plays a classically trained pianist who finds a dead student’s notebook and descends into an obsession that gets under your skin by degrees. The performance is built on small things: the way her posture changes as she grows more consumed, the shift in her eyes between scenes, a practice session that starts as discipline and curdles into something ritualistic. Nocturne is an underrated entry in her filmography that deserved more attention, and the clearest sign of where she was heading comes in that practice scene, where her fingers keep moving even after the music stops.

6. Echo Valley (2025)

Claire Garrett is stuck in a situation where every instinct tells her to run but loyalty keeps pulling her back, and this Apple Original thriller makes that tension the whole engine of the film. The emotional demand on Sweeney is constant — Claire can’t afford to break down, but she also can’t fully hold it together, and that narrow space is where the performance lives. There’s a confrontation where she stops deflecting and just stares Julianne Moore down in silence — no speech, no tears, just a jaw that tightens and eyes that refuse to look away — and it lands harder than any shouting match could. The flat, almost affectless delivery in the scenes just before it is what makes that silence finally crack open.

5. Eden (2024)

Margret Wittmer survives. That’s the quiet engine running through Sweeney’s performance in Ron Howard’s survival thriller, which premiered at TIFF and follows a group of idealists whose Galápagos colony slowly tears itself apart. While other characters unravel dramatically around her, Margret endures through stillness, through watching, through a kind of determined practicality that Sydney communicates without ever announcing it. There’s a scene where she witnesses something terrible and simply turns back to her work, and what’s striking is how completely she empties her face before doing it — no lingering horror, no visible suppression, just a woman who has already decided that feeling it later is a luxury she can’t afford. That split-second of blankness before the hands get busy again is the whole character in miniature.

4. The Housemaid (2025)

Millie Calloway walks into a wealthy household and immediately understands that something is wrong, and Sweeney plays that dawning awareness with a precision that keeps the psychological thriller humming. Adapted from the bestselling novel, this is the kind of prestige genre film that requires an actor to carry both the surface-level tension and the deeper emotional stakes simultaneously, and she does it without letting either thread go slack. There’s a particular scene where Millie realizes the full shape of what she’s walked into, and Sweeney’s choice to drop her chin slightly and slow her breathing while keeping her voice completely steady is the film’s most gripping beat — that tiny physical recalibration tells you she’s already calculating her next move before she’s finished processing the danger.

3. Reality (2023)

Almost every word spoken in this film comes directly from the FBI’s recorded transcript of their 2017 interrogation of whistleblower Reality Winner, and that constraint makes Sweeney’s performance something rare and hard to categorize. She can’t invent dialogue or lean on scripted emotional peaks — she has to find everything in micro-expressions, in the slight tremor in her voice when she’s deciding whether to lie, in the way her body language shifts between cooperative and cornered. The film is essentially a chamber piece, and Sydney holds it together with a coiled, controlled intensity that never tips into melodrama. There’s a moment mid-interrogation where she laughs at a joke from one of the agents and the laugh is just a half-beat too long — that tiny miscalculation tells you everything about where Reality’s head is at.

2. Immaculate (2024)

Sister Cecilia’s final scene doesn’t have dialogue. It doesn’t need any. Sweeney, who also produced the film, screams her way through a blood-soaked, physically brutal climax she committed to without heavy CGI or clever editing to soften the impact, and it’s the kind of ending that stays with you for days. What makes it land is the work she does in the quieter first half: the genuine devotion in Cecilia’s early scenes, the creeping confusion as things begin to feel wrong, the slow erosion of her faith and her safety. Immaculate is a horror film with real conviction behind it, and the fact that Sydney fought to get it made and then gave everything to the role makes it one of the most impressive entries in her filmography.

1. Anyone But You (2023)

Bea is the role that changed everything. The romantic comedy had been declared dead as a theatrical genre before Anyone But You arrived in December 2023 and grossed $220 million worldwide, and a significant part of why it worked is that Sweeney plays Bea with a fizzy, fully committed energy that makes you root for her even when she’s being completely unreasonable. The chemistry she builds with Glen Powell feels unforced rather than manufactured, and there are scenes where the two of them are clearly just having a great time, and that joy is contagious. She handles the comedy with real timing, the romantic tension with patience, and the vulnerable moments without letting them tip into sentiment. Bea is the character that mainstream audiences fell in love with, and the performance is the reason why.

Sydney Sweeney’s film career still feels like a snapshot rather than a verdict. The performances that matter most here, the coiled restraint of Reality, the physical commitment of Immaculate, the effortless charm of Anyone But You, suggest an actor who keeps finding new gears. For the full picture, her TV work fills in the rest: Cassie Howard in Euphoria, Olivia Mossbacher in The White Lotus, Alice in Sharp Objects, and Eden Spencer in The Handmaid’s Tale remain some of the most talked-about performances of their respective seasons.