“Alice, Darling” is an upcoming movie about a woman in an abusive relationship. Anna Kendrick stars as Alice, and the film is set to make its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Kendrick told PEOPLE that usually she decides to do a movie simply because “I read a good script and I like the people involved, and I make the movie.” That wasn’t the case with “Alice, Darling.” This script was different, and her manager knew it.

Kendrick believes that her manager sent her this script to read because he knew that she could relate to the emotional and psychological abuse that the main character was going through. He was right. Kendrick said, “I think my rep sent it to me, because he knew what I’d been dealing with and sent it along. Because he was like, ‘This sort of speaks to everything that you’ve been talking to me about.'”

Until reading the screenplay for “Alice, Darling,” Kendrick had never seen or heard emotional abuse portrayed in a way that she could relate to so much. She explained, “I had, frankly, seen a lot of movies about abusive or toxic relationships, and it didn’t really look like what was happening to me.” She added that these movies made her “normalize and minimize what was happening to me, because I thought, ‘Well, if I was in an abusive relationship, it would look like that.'”

Kendrick now realizes that her relationship was abusive. Although she didn’t disclose the name of the other person in the relationship, she did describe the type of abuse she experienced. She said, “I was in a situation where I loved and trusted this person more than I trusted myself. So when that person is telling you that you have a distorted sense of reality and that you are impossible and that all the stuff that you think is going on is not going on, your life gets really confusing really quickly. And I was in a situation where, at the end, I had the unique experience of finding out that everything I thought was going on was in fact going on. So I had this kind of springboard for feeling and recovery that a lot of people don’t get.”

Kendrick feels that she read this script at the absolutely perfect time, and when she met with the film’s director, Mary Nighy, she told her that. She explained, “I even said to her, ‘This all happened very recently. In fact, it happened so recently that if the movie was shooting in a month, I probably shouldn’t do it.’ But it was many, many months away. So I wasn’t in danger of re-traumatizing myself.”