Documentary filmmaker Jennifer Fox won the Grand Jury Documentary Prize at Sundance in 1987, when she was just 28 years old, for her debut feature Beirut: The Last Home Movie, about a Lebanese family living in a mansion in the country’s capital during its extensive civil war. She returned to Sundance this year with her first traditional (non-documentary) feature, The Tale, which received rave reviews and was picked up by HBO, which debuted the movie at the end of May. Telling the story of how Fox’s track coach groomed and molested her when she was just 13, it stars Laura Dern as the adult Fox, whose memories around that summer mislead her into thinking of it as a romantic relationship, and who tries to uncover the truth of what happened to her, thirty years later, when her mother discovers a story Fox had written at the time that described the predatory “relationship.”

Rather than simply using flashbacks, Fox tells the story as if she (as Dern) were traveling through her own memories, not just witnessing them but interacting with them, including conversations with her younger self (played by Isabelle Nélisse) and interrogations of her equestrian teacher Mrs. G (Elizabeth Debicki) within the memories. Fox arrived at Mrs. G’s for a summer of horseback riding lessons, and is immediately introduced to the charming forty-ish neighbor Bill Allens (Jason Ritter), who is Mrs. G’s lover and who quickly turns the charm on for Jenny, then gradually grooms her for rape.

Nearly every revelation in Fox’s memory begins with a false start, some detail rendered inaccurately (including her own age at the time of the assaults) or person not remembered, so that The Tale becomes not just a story about a young girl sexually assaulted by an older man, but about how we respond to trauma within our minds – how our brains can try to protect us by creating a fictional shell around the more difficult truth. Thus the movie plays out as a true-life detective story, where the culprit is known but the crime is hazy, and Fox has to navigate her own memories by uncovering clues in the present day – talking to her fellow students at the time and visiting Mrs. G, who goes from helpful to stonewalling in the blink of an eye – so that she can peel away the fictional outer layer on those memories and show us the truth. The technique is jarring, as it should be given the subject matter, because any scene showing the past may subsequently be rewound and rewritten so we can see it as it actually happened, not as present-day Fox recalled it. It’s most striking when she discovers another young girl (older than she was) in photographs from that summer whom she hadn’t remembered at all.

Dern is riveting as Fox, carrying us through the stages of denial, anger, and eventually something like acceptance – she confronts Bill in the present day, in a scene that is truly fictional but also pivotal to resolving the film – and making her seem understandably irrational in her worst moments. There’s a fight with her fiancé, played by Common, that is anguishing to watch because it’s clear that he’s right and willing to help, but she’s incapable of even discussing what happened with the person who is, in theory, closest to her. And Ritter is so creepy in the grooming moments – let alone the utterly harrowing, barely watchable scenes of statutory rape (filmed with a body double for Nélisse) – that it’ll be hard to see him in anything else in the future. (It also doesn’t help that he looks so much like his dad, the late John Ritter of Three’s Company fame.)

There’s a recurring refrain in The Tale that’s used to hand-wave away any violations of social norms or boundaries, including the whole idea that a 40-year-old man shouldn’t have sex with a 13-year-old girl: “It was the seventies.” There’s such a note of dismissiveness in the quote, uttered by at least three different characters, that you feel how uphill Fox’s battle to get at the truth might have been for her. People don’t like to dig up the past in any unpleasant circumstances, even less so when they might feel some complicity in someone else’s crimes, and pointing to the sexual permissiveness of the era – which was used to try to whitewash the story of David Bowie sleeping with teenaged groupies after his passing – only adds another wall for the victims to scale as they try to grapple with their histories of trauma.

The Tale uses Jennifer Fox’s real name for her character, but changed the names of the real-life Mrs. G and Bill Allens, as both are still alive. There is no indication whether Allens ever faced any charges or even repercussions for what is later implied to be dozens of assaults on various underaged girls, or if the various buildings or wings of buildings named for him still bear his name. I understand the legal ramifications of using his real name in the film, but if he’s still alive, he may still be a threat, and there are likely may other surviving victims who would like answers, even if justice is still beyond them.

Because it hasn’t received a theatrical release, The Tale isn’t eligible for Oscar or other annual awards for movies, but should earn Emmy consideration this fall for the movie itself and for Dern, Ritter, and Fox both as director and writer. I’ll still rank it along movies that did go to theaters at some point, and I’ll guess even before the halfway point that it’ll end up in my top ten for 2018. It’s powerful without ever manipulating its audience, and the novel way it walks us down the false starts of memory gives the viewer such a sense of Fox’s confusion that you’ll crave the catharsis that Fox can never really receive.