PRESENT TENSE

If a designated "thriller" doesn't have E-ticket action, it had better come up with some other way to keep its audience riveted. The dark, edgy drama, Beast, manages this, big time; it has thrills to spare, not from violent action, but from the deft accumulation of detail.

For his impressive debut feature, writer-director Michael Pearce crafts an eerie mood of unspecified menace, in which anything might happen — and anyone might be capable of the most heinous actions. Trying to figure out whodunit — that weary cliché — is a puzzle that keeps us on the edge of our seats in Pearce's capable hands.

The tale is set in a contemporary village community on the isle of Jersey, off the southern coast of England. The town is on edge over a series of murders of young women. The serial-killer-on-the-loose motif is standard for the genre, but Pearce uses it as a launching pad to examine the tensions (emotional, psychological, cultural) already at work beneath the placid surface of this middle-class community.

At the heart of the story (and Pearce's nesting-doll design of inner tensions wrapped around each other) is young, twenty-something Moll, skillfully played with both presence and vulnerability by Irish singer and actress Jessie Buckley. She is ably partnered by Johnny Flynn — unsettling, and dynamic — as Pascal Renouf, a reclusive young handyman living in a stone cottage inherited from his parents far out on the edge of town.

Not every question is neatly wrapped up, but the stylish look of the movie, its dark heart, and the fascinating complexity of leads Buckley and Flynn, make for a highly provocative thriller.

(Read more in next week's Good Times)