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If you believe the blurbs, half the movies passing through theatres feature "tour de force" performances -- star turns by actors operating at the very top of their talents, laying bare every cranny of their characters' complexities. Such performances are kind of rare, actually, but a new British film called "The Wasp" is graced with two of them.

The picture has some of the dark attributes of a horror movie. There's no gore to speak of (apart from a brief gush toward the end), but the story is thick with cruel and unsavory suggestions -- and with one event, dredged up from deep in the past, that's all the more disturbing for the burnished manner in which director Guillem Morales has filmed it.

The stars are two exceptional English actors: Naomie Harris, who played Moneypenny in the last three Bond movies, and Natalie Dormer, who spent five seasons playing Margaery Tyrell in "Game of Thrones." Here, Harris is Heather Foxfield, a sleek matron in the prosperous spa town of Bath; Dormer, playing a woman named Carla Jackson, is Heather's social opposite, a sour and struggling supermarket clerk with four kids already and a fifth very noticeably on the way.

Heather and Carla were close friends about 30 years ago, back in their school days, but they had an ugly falling-out and haven't been in touch since then. So Carla is surprised to receive an email from Heather one day, requesting that they meet; she has a proposition, Heather says -- and it turns out to be one that propels the story into disturbing backchannels of these two women's lives.

Heather says that she wants Carla to murder her husband, Simon (Dominic Allburn), who has been cheating on her for the past two years. She is prepared to pay Carla 50,000 pounds if she will accept this assignment -- 10,000 of it right now. She knows that Carla is desperate for money -- she's been tracking her social interactions online -- and since she once saw Carla mercifully kill a wounded pigeon back when they were kids, she figures her former friend would by now be a natural for a more advanced sort of homicide.

The story, scripted by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, is incessantly twisty -- just when you think you have a handle on what's happening, it turns out you're wrong. And Harris and Dormer are wonderfully droll, especially when their characters are plotting the crime. Carla, who's done some breaking and entering in her time, thinks they should stage the scene (Heather's bougie home) to look like the site of a botched robbery. But this would involve Carla actually stealing some of Heather's stuff, which turns out to be a problem. "I'm loathe to lose too many of my belongings," says Heather, surely the snootiest woman within the Bath city limits.

Inevitably, as Carla and Heather wrangle with the difficulties involved in terminating one of their mates, the subject of children comes up. Heather and her husband have tried reproducing, over and over, but with no luck. Carla, on the other hand, can't seem to stop. "I got pregnant the first time, and every time I tried," she says. This line of conversation leads, unexpectedly, into an enlightening monologue by Heather about the icky life of a species of wasp called a tarantula hawk. This is an alarming creature that lays eggs inside the spiders on which it preys and leaves them to eat their way out from the inside.

"Dark," says Carla. "Bit like being pregnant."

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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