Beast.

Who is the actual Beast of this taut, Hitchcockian thriller’s title? Although we’re led to believe from the start that it’s the rakish, mysterious outsider, who quickly becomes the suspect in a series of killings of young girls on the British Crown Dependency of Jersey, the title, like many other names and aspects of this intense and well-acted film, carries more than one meaning. (It’s available to rent on amazon.)

Beast is the debut feature from director and screenwriter Michael Pearce, who has just a handful of British TV credits to his name, and hinges on a star turn from Irish actress Jessie Buckley as Moll, a young woman in her mid-20s who lives with her domineering mother and senile father in a giant house that still feels awfully close on screen. The film opens with Moll’s birthday party, at which she is quickly upstaged by her beautiful sister, leading Moll to flee to go out dancing all night, eventually leading her to a chance encounter with Pascal (Johnny Flynn), a rifle-toting loner who lives on his own and seems to be the only person who treats Moll as an individual. His status as an outsider from polite society – ironic, as he’s of old Jersey stock, evidenced by his French surname, Deneuve – makes him an easy target for the police as they look for the man who’s raped and killed three teenaged girls on the small island, pushing Moll into the quandary of having to lie to protect her new lover or to question the possibility that he’s a murderer.

Although the obvious implication of the title and the posters showing Flynn out of focus at the front of the picture is that Pascal is or might be the beast, the script regularly offers us potential interpretations of the term. Moll herself has something in her past that’s revealed in stages over the course of the film, but it’s clear from the start that she is at least a complex character with something serious and unaddressed inside of her, based on something she does before leaving the house during her party. There’s a graphic scene later in the film involving an animal Moll shoots under Pascal’s training that also reveals an unexpected rage within Moll that will also be gradually and incompletely explained as the film progresses. And her mother, Hillary (Geraldine James), who favors her other two children over Moll, is utterly terrifying in her controlling nature, reducing Moll to a blubbering child, and her instantaneous shifts to everything-is-okay mode, even concluding one scolding with, “Let’s all be friends again.” Even as we’re given a Moll-Pascal relationship that could be dangerous, we’re given plain evidence that the relationship between Hillary and her mother is downright toxic.

Pascal’s name itself feels like another ironic twist in a film laden with irony and misdirection. Pascal’s wager argues that a bet on God’s existence, and thus eternal life after death, has a positive payoff if correct but little or no negative cost if wrong, while a bet against God’s existence, thus living a life of sin, has a huge negative cost if wrong and little to no benefit if correct. Beast‘s version of Pascal’s wager for Moll is flipped on its head – she can bet that he’s not the killer, but that bet carries some rather substantial downside risk for her, and she may actually be chasing the illusion of love rather than a true version of it. Even when she sees a glimpse of what Pascal is capable of doing when angry, and gets evidence from her very creepy cop friend (or cousin?) that Pascal has hurt someone before, she still decides to believe in her lover rather than anything else she’s seen – and we are left in the dark right up until the end of the film on whether she made the right call.

The ending of Beast is wonderfully ambiguous as well; after Pascal does something I would call unforgivable, the tenor shifts, and the last layers of Moll’s exterior are peeled back, and their entire relationship changes color to something much darker and bleaker. Buckley’s performance as Moll is riveting – I doubt there will be five better performances by lead actresses in all of 2018 – as she seems to portray a set of interrelated characters all rolled up into one, at times appearing to be an awkward teenager, at times an independent and headstrong adult. The film also gives us clues as to her states of mind or roles within scenes by changing Buckley’s hairstyle, whether it’s pulled back, tightly curled, frizzy, even a little mussed, just enough to alter her mien and put her in different footing in each setting. (Also, I know that the fairy tale character’s hair isn’t red, but the scenes of Moll walking through the forest gave me a Little Red Riding Hood vibe … and we’re left to wonder if Pascal is a real human or just a wolf in disguise.)

The scenes with Cliff and one with a stark, accented policewoman from off island are a bit forced, and it’s unclear why Moll or Pascal would be interrogated without attorneys or would agree to it when not obligated to stay; those are the only times when the tension flags and the element that puts the viewer right into the film starts to fade. The remainder of Beast is utterly intense from start to finish, and the conclusion is just ambiguous enough to let the viewer come up with another interpretation, Memento-like, to everything that came before. This deserves a much wider audience, and Buckley in particular should be on everyone’s short list for acting awards in the fall.