Beast

British TV director Michael Pearce makes a commanding feature debut with this psychological drama-thriller that puts an eerily windswept island location to fine use and features an excellent lead performance from Jessie Buckley, whose open, intelligent face transmits thought and feeling with piercing clarity. Pearce has also written a well-carpentered screenplay; there are some very big scenes and big moments here – sometimes too big – but he gives us a carefully crafted dramatic setup, an intriguingly curated selection of suspects for the crime and all of it building to a fascinating, finely balanced ambiguity in the movie’s climactic stages.

The scene is Jersey, where a serial killer has murdered several young girls; in their tense, clenched way the citizens are carrying on, only rarely acknowledging this elephant of horror in their living room. Buckley plays Moll, a delicately beautiful and unhappy young woman and put-upon daughter (the character reminded me of her Marya Bolkonskaya in the BBC’s recent War and Peace), who has a terrible job that she hates: a tourist bus-trip guide.

She lives at home with her parents, a dad with Alzheimer’s and a fiercely controlling mother Hilary (Geraldine James) who conducts the church choir of which Moll is an obedient member. Hilary treats Moll like a child who needs cold and unfeeling discipline; she doesn’t hesitate to make it clear that Moll is a lesser sibling than her smug brother Harrison (Oliver Maltman) or her manicured sister Polly (Shannon Tarbet), who manages to upstage Moll at her own birthday party by complacently announcing that she is pregnant with twins (Hilary impulsively asks for the champagne to be brought from the garage, and to add insult to injury tells the birthday girl to go and get it). Enraged, Moll runs out on the gathering, which includes Cliff (Trystan Gravelle), the stuffy young police officer who is hoping to make her his girlfriend.