'The Wasp' review: High-wire thriller builds to a gut punch of an ending

A woman traps a wasp under a glass in her kitchen. It’s not the only wasp that has infiltrated her home, not that her preoccupied husband seems to care.

Two girls come across a dying pigeon in the woods. One of them takes a rock and crushes the wounded bird, her expression showing not a trace of empathy.

Late in the evening, a pregnant wife and mother of four tells her husband, “I’m going out, I’ve got work,” and a moment later we see her climbing into a flashy blue sports car driven by an unseen man who is a regular client.

These seemingly random and unrelated incidents are neither, as it turns out. Everything that transpires in the tightly spun if sometimes plausibility-bending psychological thriller “The Wasp” eventually connects — and when it all comes together, it’s a shocking and visceral gut punch. With director Guillem Morales expertly building the tension and Morgan Lloyd Malcolm adapting her 2015 play of the same name in a way that expands the world of these characters yet retains the intense feeling of a staged work, “The Wasp” is an effectively chilling ride that is reminiscent of lurid and intense thrillers of the 1990s such as “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” and “Single White Female.”

Set in an unnamed city and filmed in Bath, England, “The Wasp” opens with an introduction into the life of Heather (Naomie Harris), who lives with her husband Simon (Dominic Allburn) in an upscale home that is tastefully appointed but so antiseptic in design, it looks like it’s been decorated by professional stagers for a potential sale. It’s evident Heather feels utterly alone (the couple has been unable to have children), as her husband is so preoccupied with work, it’s as if he’s out of focus even when he’s in the same room with her.

On the other side of town, a sharp-tongued and world-weary woman named Carla (Natalie Dormer) is pregnant with her fifth child, working endless and thankless hours as a cashier and barely scraping by, if that. When Carla finally agrees to meet with Heather after receiving a barrage of texts, we learn they were school friends as young girls but haven’t seen each other in years — and that’s why Heather believes Carla is the perfect candidate to murder her husband in exchange for a large chunk of cash that will change Carla’s life. Wait, what?

It’s a plot development straight out of a Hitchcock movie, and it kicks “The Wasp” into a completely different gear, as we segue from domestic drama into a living room noir, with Carla resisting this insane idea until she doesn’t.

There’s an almost comedic absurdity to this scheme, given Carla has perhaps a few minor criminal infractions in her past and Heather is so straitlaced she’s probably never received a traffic citation. What do these two know about hatching a murder plot? As they go over the details in Heather’s living room, it’s as if they’re blocking moves for a play — but this is all too real. They’re going to kill this man.

With the screenplay delving into issues of race and class and the horrors of domestic abuse, “The Wasp” frequently flashes back to the relatively brief period when Heather and Carla were friends before they had a falling out that resulted in — well, let’s just leave it there. All will eventually be revealed. (Leah Modesir-Simmonds and Olivia Juno Cleverley do fine work as the young Heather and the young Carla, respectively.)

The play has been expanded to include a number of outdoor scenes (an early sequence in which Heather and Carla parlay with one another while walking through the city is beautifully filmed), but a great deal of the proceedings take place within the pristine environs of Heather’s home. Little by little, emotional scar by emotional scar, we learn that both Heather and Carla have in some ways never gotten past the circumstances of their fractured friendship all those years ago, to the point where we begin to wonder if Heather’s husband Simon is the real target here.

Naomie Harris has been a most welcome fixture in films, from “28 Days Later” to “Moonlight” to multiple appearances in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” and James Bond franchises, for more than two decades. Natalie Dormer has shined most prominently on TV series such as “The Tudors,” “Game of Thrones” and “Penny Dreadful: City of Angels.” As good as they’ve both been in a myriad of projects, they’ve never been better than they are here.