In NEON’s new psychological thriller Shelby Oaks, the Canadian actor delivers a performance defined by defiance, perseverance, and a love that refuses to fade
Camille Sullivan is drawn to women who don’t give up easily. She is obsessed with the kind who will walk straight into the dark because no one else wants to.
In Shelby Oaks, the new NEON film from Chris Stuckmann, she plays Mia, a woman still searching for her sister twelve years after she vanished. “Even when everyone else has given up hope, Mia never wavers,” Sullivan says. “She trusts her instincts over everything else and puts both her sanity and her safety at risk. Even though she goes to the darkest places, she’s driven by love.”
Love, in Sullivan’s view, isn’t soft. It should be a potent force that pulls you under [and keeps you there]. For Mia, it’s the only thing left that feels real. “Loss is only as strong as the love that’s missing,” she says. “Holding on to the grief is a way of staying close to her sister. If she lets go of that sadness, she has to accept that Riley is really gone.”
Sullivan approaches fear as a physical instinct, rather merely an emotion or idea. “Fear lives in the body,” she says. “I work with shallow, rapid breath and a slight shake in my hands to get into a fight-or-flight posture. From there, I focus on the escape rather than the obstacle.” It’s a deeply interesting approach, like an actor’s version of survival training, and its embodiment and precision is what makes it so beautifully devastating to watch.
The film’s found-footage style adds another layer of immediacy. It’s a niche kind of surveillance intimacy that mirrors Mia’s obsession. “The documentary style mirrors how she’s been trapped in this event for years,” Sullivan says. “Her whole life is looking back. But when new information arrives, her journey suddenly moves forward. She has to draw on different parts of herself to meet each new moment.”
One of the most remarkable things about Sullivan is her capacity to transmute chaos into something brilliant. Her filmography (Hunter Hunter, The Unseen, The Birdwatcher) reads like a crash course in endurance. “I enjoy playing high-stakes situations. I like to take big swings. That’s the kind of work I put out there, so that’s the kind of work that finds me.”
The roots of that discipline trace back to one of her earliest jobs, on Chris Haddock’s Canadian series Intelligence. “He told us at the first read-through: we better come ready, because we were gonna move fast. Two takes and you’re done. That was terrifying and brilliant. Since then, I’ve always tried to come ready to roll.”
We speak about her appraisal of her own work. She tells me she watches out of curiosity, more than vanity. It’s not about chasing perfection, but studying it in entirety. “I like to see how the project turned out, what the sum of its parts are. I see where I could’ve done better, but also where I succeeded. I try to learn what I can and carry those lessons into the next one.”
Her performances are gripping in their resistance of the neatness of genre; they invite empathy rather than mere entertainment. She hopes audiences see “something of themselves…something that speaks to them in a personal way.”
To end, I ask Sullivan how she defines herself after two decades of work. She pauses before answering. “I’d like to be defined as an actor who takes chances. Who may not always give you what you expect but always gives you something true.”
“In fact, I’m probably really defined by perseverance. Aren’t we all?”
Shelby Oaks releases in UK theatres on October 31, 2025.
