Anna Lise Phillips as Catherine Waterford in WillFull (2001)

In WillFull, Anna Lise Phillips plays Catherine Waterford, a woman who comes home to familiar places and finds her late mother still has opinions about her life. The 2001 Australian comedy was made by Sydney’s Latent Image Productions, with Rebel Penfold-Russell directing a screenplay by Harry Cripps. Phillips carries it as the one character who can see the ghost.

The setup is simple. Catherine’s boyfriend, motivational speaker Nat Wolff (C. Thomas Howell), cannot understand why she keeps answering someone he cannot see. Her mother, Katya (Anne Looby), is dead but not finished with her daughter. Catherine’s task in the film is to listen, resist, and eventually make peace.

The look of Catherine

The film’s design credits sit with George Liddle, who is credited as both production designer and costume designer. Steve Arnold shot it and Antony Partos wrote the score. The film leans on contrast: Catherine in the present is a grounded, slightly bewildered figure, while the ghost brings the noise and the party.

Variety singled out the flashback sequences, in which Ellesha Dobbs plays Catherine as a child. It called them beautifully lit and shot, almost as if from another movie. Those scenes give Phillips’s character a past, and they are where the film’s emotional weight is meant to sit.

The scenes that define the role

The scenes people remember are the ones where Catherine talks to an empty room. Phillips has to play both ends of a conversation that only she can hear, while Howell’s Nat reacts in confusion. Looby’s Katya supplies the comedy. Phillips has to supply the reasons it hurts.

The older supporting players add to that circle. Bud Tingwell and John Gaden appear as members of the dead woman’s extended family. Nicki Wendt plays Nat’s assistant.

How the performance was received

Variety reviewed the film at the Seattle Film Festival on June 16, 2001, and was not kind to it. The trade paper compared Phillips to Kerry Fox and said her performance had one startled expression. It argued that the filmmakers never gave Catherine interests of her own. That was a criticism of the writing as much as the acting, and it said the film ends with TV-movie closure.

The role is best read as a test of reaction. A character who spends the film responding to someone else leaves an actor little room, and Phillips’s work here is the steady centre of a film built around its ghost.

Where the role sits in her career

Phillips grew up in Darwin, where she was a founding member of the Corrugated Iron Youth Theatre, and trained at the National Institute of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1996. Her first major film role was in The Boys (1998). She was then nominated for an AFI award for Envy, also known as The New Girlfriend. WillFull was one of her first leading film parts.

Afterward she moved between film and television. Walking on Water (2002), in which she played Kate, followed, as did the Australian series Young Lions (2002), where she played Detective Senior Constable Cameron Smart. Later credits include the American series Revolution (2012), Foxtel’s Devil’s Playground (2014) with Toni Collette, and Harrow, in which she played Stephanie Tolson from 2018. She also appeared in Irreverent (2022) as Helen and in The Clearing (2023) as Hannah Wilczek.

WillFull remains a small Australian curiosity: a comedy about grief and an overbearing parent, with a lead who plays it straight while everyone around her plays it loud.

The header image is an AI-generated illustration, not an actual photo or film still.