July 2026 has turned out to be a rough month for Netflix‘s movie library. More than 50 licensed titles are set to leave on August 1, and the latest wave includes a few big ones. Atonement is probably the standout loss, but Borat and several Alex Garland-written films are on the way out too. Earlier this month, subscribers already said goodbye to the Saw franchise, Sliding Doors, and Bohemian Rhapsody. One exit in particular feels different, though, because the movie in question isn’t a licensed title at all. It’s one of Netflix’s own.
Tallulah, a comedy-drama starring Elliot Page and Allison Janney, is set to leave Netflix on July 29, 2026, ten years to the day after it arrived. After premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, Tallulah debuted on Netflix on July 29, 2016, and has stayed there ever since. Netflix originals do leave from time to time, but much less often than licensed titles, and usually with far less attention. Tallulah was written and directed by Sian Heder in her feature directorial debut, soon going on to become one of the more quietly consequential filmmakers of the streaming era.
Her follow-up, CODA, premiered at Sundance in 2021, where Apple bought the rights for $25 million before releasing it on Apple TV+ in August of that year. CODA, of course, went on to win Best Picture, making Heder an Oscar-winning writer-director. Looking back now, Tallulah feels recognizably like a Sian Heder film. Page plays a drifter who impulsively takes a baby after seeing the child’s mother treat her with careless neglect. She then shows up at the home of her ex-boyfriend’s mother (Allison Janney), and passes the infant off as her granddaughter.
The lie arguably works, as both women need it to be true in different ways. That is where the film gets interesting, and where Heder’s instincts as a storyteller start to show. A lesser movie would immediately lean into the manhunt — and to be fair, there is one — since a stolen baby doesn’t go unnoticed for long and the walls do begin closing in as the investigation picks up. But Heder keeps the ticking clock almost entirely in the background and stays focused on the characters.
Tallulah was personal for Heder, perhaps more than most debuts. In an interview with WBUR, she said the idea came from her years working as a nanny, where she had “several surreal experiences with bad moms.” One of those experiences was unsettling enough that she briefly considered taking the baby home herself. That moment eventually became the basis for her short film Mother, and later Tallulah. The feature took more than a decade to come together, and by then Heder had become a mother twice over, which only makes the film’s anxieties around care and responsibility feel more lived-in.
The film holds an 85% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 69% audience score, which feels about right for a film that is thoughtful, thorny, and a little hard to love in a conventional crowd-pleaser way. That said, this small Netflix original has no obvious second home, and once it’s gone, it may be genuinely difficult to find. If Tallulah has been idling in your queue since 2016, this seems like the week to finally clear it.
- Release Date
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June 2, 2016
- Runtime
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111 minutes
- Director
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Siân Heder
- Producers
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Chris Columbus, David Newsom, Eleanor Columbus, Elliot Page, Todd Traina, Russell Levine
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