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You always know a Plaza performance will be good, but over the past few years, Plaza has seemed to make it a priority to surprise her audiences with just how good she is.

Ford imbues his story with a tense, vibrating energy, moving briskly between the breathlessness of a heist thriller and the sharper barbs of social satire.

Ford has a knack for making us sweat without relying on an over-egged score or over-stacked stakes. It’s a genre movie with its feet firmly on the ground, small in scale and tight in focus.

A cool, confident debut whose steady build mirrors the increasing stakes faced by its namesake, John Patton Ford’s Emily the Criminal is a nail-biter that makes the most of the tough side Aubrey Plaza has shown in even her most comic performances.

Plaza, who follows up Black Bear with another darker turn, is great in a role that lets her badass side out for a rampage.

There are definitely some logical gaps in Ford’s screenplay and perhaps the consequences could be slightly more dangerous (intriguingly, guns barely appear throughout the proceedings), but as a filmmaker, he displays a keen awareness of racking up the tension when necessary and not overdoing it when it’s not.

Plaza's performance, which grows more desperate and more fierce, is what keeps things going. Tension continually mounts and builds, and writer-director Ford stages several anxiety-ridden set-pieces that inspire a sick-to-your-stomach feeling.

The finale of Emily the Criminal does not match the pulse-pounding scenes of her earlier assignments. However, it still manages to work toward a satisfying, logical conclusion while offering a solid critique of the gig economy many Americans face in which fortune is merely a credit card swipe away.

There’s a lot to sink your teeth into with Emily the Criminal, between its strong Plaza turn and a pitch-black moral core that refreshingly commits to the bit. But outside of those devilish comforts, a lot of Ford’s debut is frustratingly thin, more concerned with giving Plaza plenty of opportunities to bore through the screen with her eyes in extreme close-up than in really breaking down her psychology and the perverse romance at its center.

Despite the fact that the camera rarely backs away from studying Plaza’s wary eyes and tense mouth in close-up, this character piece feels as distanced from its taciturn subject as if it was merely monitoring her on security camera.