Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut is interesting – and its breakout performance is fascinating.

Everything electric, elusive, and tactile about the chemistry between Dakota Johnson and Olivia Colman, the dreaminess of Hélène Louvart‘s cinematography, and the synaptic rhythms of Affonso Gonçalves‘ editing, is captured in this scene breakdown with Johnson and (debut!) director Maggie Gyllenhaal (via Vanity Fair)…

… but what isn’t captured in that breakdown is the magnetic unpredictability and simmering chaos of Jessie Buckley‘s performance as the young Olivia Coleman – a casting choice which seems odd at first, until you begin to see for yourself the fractured magic Buckley weaves between her episodic scenes. Wow.

Between the four women, a picture that is at once shimmering, impressionistic, angular, and brittle, is painted of the cracks within motherhood within which urges we speak not of are located: desire, loss, loathing, destruction. A unique directorial debut, with a uniquely riveting breakout performance.