The worst thing about Netflix’s mysteriously canceled thriller Rebel Ridge is its abysmally generic title. It sounds like an anonymous action trash movie that a lesser-known Hemsworth could star in, and along with a brawn-over-heads trailer and a barely-there PR campaign, you might expect it to be another ineffective pastime from the streamer. But there’s a lot more to digest here: a full three-course meal popping up on a platform that usually distracts us with snacks, and one of the most damning arguments against a big-name filmmaker collaborating with them; a film that deserved the very most, somehow saddled with the very least.

Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier, who broke out with Blue Ruin and then the gloriously gnarly Green Room, teamed up with Netflix in 2018 for his patchy adaptation of Hold the Dark, a film that at least had a Toronto film festival premiere. His follow-up film stalls strangely, being denied even a token theatrical release, and cruelly landing in the middle of the fall festival season but without a slot at Venice, Telluride or Toronto. Perhaps it’s the curse that began in 2020, when production was halted just weeks after the Covid pandemic hit, and continued after a May 2021 reboot that was halted again the following month when original star John Boyega dropped out. It took until the following year for everything to come back together, sans Boyega, and now, two years later, the film lands without much fanfare, though it would have deserved a parade.

It begins with a nightmare that immediately grips you. Terry (now played by Aaron Pierre of Old and Brother fame) is riding his bike down a country road when he is hit and pinned to the ground by a police car. Vague, baseless accusations are made (the tension is heightened by race: Terry is a black man being questioned by two white cops) and money is found when his bag is searched. Terry explains that he wants to bail out his cousin, but the police will take the money anyway and he can file a complaint to get it back – a lengthy process that would put his cousin in danger: he is a key witness in a gangland murder trial and is being sent to state prison with a target on his back. He is caught in a tangled system, dealing with both local cops with an agenda and a country that allows the powerful to easily and legally gain advantages.

What follows is a strange and utterly gripping whirlwind of small-town western, 96 Hours-style action thriller (Terry is blessed with a very special set of skills) and gritty social drama. What’s remarkable is how committed and skillful Saulnier is to each strand, a full-body workout for us viewers that gets our pulses racing and our brains engaged, a two-hour-plus saga that keeps us hooked at every second. It may sound like low-grade praise, but Saulnier’s writing is so refreshingly clear – a ticking clock, stakes set and then reset, stakes raised and then raised again – and such maturity in the way he controls the stronger genre elements. The revelation of Terry’s background – a Marine with expertise in hand-to-hand combat – is something we’ve grown a little tired of, thanks largely to Liam Neeson, but here it’s treated with more realism and some humor, a portrait of a man who is well aware of his physical strengths and tries to use them skillfully within the law (there’s a fantastically well-choreographed scene where he uses his body for the first time to skillfully gain control of an escalating situation).

Terry gets a partner in local law clerk Summer (child actress AnnaSophia Robb), who educates him on the depressing intricacies of a broken legal system and helps him because she, too, is a victim of it. Saulnier’s long list of grievances is long but effective, making you scream it at the screen and it’s crucially detailed without being too harsh despite the many social ills being served up to us (it’s also a lot more fun than you’d expect). There’s a rising tide of anger that’s easy to get swept up in (the feeling is reminiscent of watching a series of John Oliver segments at times) and which, thanks to Pierre and Robb, amplifies any emotional investment we already have in the human drama. They make an incredibly appealing and dynamic duo, bonded by shared anger and frustration, while Don Johnson, as the main antagonist, is a suitably vile but never over-the-top sheriff. For British actor Pierre, it is the moment when he appears like a real movie star: he shines in the role of the imposing, wealthy man who is used to playing along politely until, when all else fails, all hell breaks loose.

As his standout gunfight in Hold the Dark suggests, Saulnier knows how to stage that final shootout, and his direction throughout the film is stylish yet comfortably understated (he confidently incorporates continuous tracking shots without smugly calling attention to them), and he builds in more dank tension than most thrillers I’ve seen in the last year. Rebel Ridge is so electrifying—I just hope enough people get the chance to feel it.