Alice Olson

Alice Olson is the wife of Frank Olson, a government scientist working in biological warfare research in the early 1950s. Seen in the dramatized reconstructions at the heart of this Errol Morris docudrama, she is a devoted, watchful presence at home, sensing something is wrong with her husband without yet knowing what.

Molly Parker plays her with a stillness that carries real weight — a woman whose intuition outpaces the facts available to her. The film gives Alice few words but many long silences, and Parker fills them with a quiet, accumulating dread that never tips into melodrama, grounding the show's paranoid sprawl in one woman's private unease.