The lauded writer-director Todd Field has been quiet for the last sixteen years. His last feature, Little Children, debuted in 2006, and in the years since we haven’t heard much of anything from one of the more promising American filmmakers to emerge in the early part of this century. But in all that absence, Field hasn’t been inactive. He’s been productively observing all of culture’s many defining undulations, as is vividly evident in his new film TÁR, a towering achievement which premiered here at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday.

TÁR is about a composer and conductor, Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), renowned the world over for her interpretations of classical music. She’s a wealthy EGOT-winner and holds the ultra-prestigious position of head conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. Poised and leonine, Lydia cuts a formidable figure. Field introduces her to us by way of an on-stage chat with New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. It’s a long conversation—filmed with steady and arresting calm—about Lydia’s approach to her work, her philosophies on music and its meaning. All this abstract monologuing skirts the edges of pretension, but remains gripping because of the magnetic person doing the over-egged sermonizing.

We later see Lydia teaching a Juilliard master class to a small group of aspiring conductors. Here the chumminess of the New Yorker talk gives way to something haughtier, more biting—because, we can assume, Lydia’s audience has shifted. She’s still a commanding presence on whose every word we hang, but her profile is suddenly flecked with a menace not seen when she was performing for those she might more readily see as peers.

In these establishing scenes, and really throughout the film, Field shrewdly illustrates both the magnificence of Lydia’s genius and its threat. She can be accommodating of her lessers, but just as often she—privately and publicly—debases them. She refers to those who question or otherwise frustrate her as "robots" and "nobodies." She toys with people’s careers to suit her whims and manipulative schemes. She’s alternately blithe and needy with her wife, a first chair violinist played by Nina Hoss, and is only a fleeting presence in her young daughter’s life.

TÁR first awes us with Lydia’s elegance and acumen, cows us into submission to her intimidating intellect, before beginning its investigation into what that reverence has allowed. When does a person’s brilliance, so potent and singular, curdle into a kind of aggression? Lydia—a close acolyte (and imitator) of Leonard Bernstein in this movie’s version of history—is perhaps at the vertiginous top of her field. Bad habits can develop in all that alienating esteem.

Gradually, TÁR gives us clues about what’s going on just outside the film’s close gaze. We receive snippets of information about one of Lydia’s past proteges, a troubled young woman who has become an insistent nuisance scratching at the impervious majesty of Lydia’s life and career. There are brief, unnerving sequences in which we view Lydia’s apartment and Lydia herself, asleep on a private jet, through video captured by some unseen person’s phone. Text messages on the screen suggest a sneering disdain for the great master. Lydia is being watched, reconsidered, maligned. There is a fissure somewhere in her sterling reputation that, as the film sumptuously unfolds, cracks open into ruin.

In somewhat reductive terms, TÁR is a film about the recent wave of #MeToo-adjacent accusations that have brought down titans in many industries, but especially in the arts. Lydia Tár becomes just such a figure. Field’s film—ruthless and grimly funny—builds toward a mighty, but not entirely conclusive, reckoning. Field nails the fraught tenor of this very contemporary discourse, both its urgency and the fear (mostly shared by those on, or adjacent to, the receiving end of accusations) that some line has been crossed into overreach.

Though TÁR is near-entirely rooted in the perspective of the accused, the film is not positioned as an act of empathy, some exercise in recognizing the vulnerable humanity of those who prey upon people in their thrall. Field has crafted a sharp and damning character study, one that understands, and even appreciates, the wonder of Lydia’s talent (or that of some real-world figure, like disgraced conductor James Levine, who is mentioned by name in the film) while never using it as a reason to excuse anything.

The film is loaded with references to high-culture figures, to literature, to music theory. It all sounds pretty impressive. Which is the point: how often have we been so glamoured by smarts and talent and accomplishment that we miss an obvious pattern, or disregard contrary narratives as bitter noise? TÁR offers itself up as instructive tool, diligently tearing down the specific mythos that Field has worked so meticulously to create.

Somehow, this all happens without the moralistic droning of a lecture. TÁR is breathtaking entertainment, beautifully tailored in luxe, eerie Euro sleekness by production designer Marco Bittner Rosser and cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, and ominously scored by Hildur Guðnadóttir (who gets a little meta shout-out in the film). That fine craftsmanship is all anchored by Blanchett’s alternately measured and ferocious performance, a tremendous (but never outsized) piece of acting that is her most piercing work in years. Alluring and frighteningly vituperative, Lydia is a beguiling creation, all the more villainous for the beauty that birthed her.

Field allows for glimpses of Lydia’s more benign creative passion, the primal and valuable thing in her that brought her to such success. We watch as she turns the tinny, electric plink of a doorbell, constantly distracting her from her work, into a lilting piece of music. She angrily crafts an accordion song on the fly, belting out alone in her cozily shabby atelier to annoy some nattering neighbors. In these moments there is a glimmer of the pure and uncompromised artist. Lydia seems to gather the noise of the world and fashion it into fresh and vital understanding. What a marvelous gift, and what a pathetic shame that it should one day result in such destructive vanity.

TÁR ultimately has no pity for Lydia’s trajectory, but it does perhaps quietly mourn for the art—bemoan the corruption of something good at the hands of ego and entitlement. Field’s film is enormous, contemplating the end of idolism in all its loss and revolution. TÁR bracingly responds to the dawning of a new era, and reintroduces the world to a filmmaker who seems only better for having taken some time, a very long time indeed, to listen and to learn.