Best known for one of the showiest portrayals of rage set to cinema (pet rabbits beware Alex’s Fatal Attraction!), Glenn Close gets to take a slow-burn turn as doting spouse with a secret in the sleeper character study film that may finally land her a deserved Academy Award. Björn Runge’s austere drama The Wife (B-), written by Jane Anderson based on Meg Wolitzer’s novel, follows Close as the title character and her novelist husband (Jonathan Pryce) on a fateful trip to Stockholm where he receives a Nobel Prize for Literature and she experiences a wake-up call about why she has enabled an extremely flawed partner. Pryce is an effective blowhard, and Christian Slater is also quite watchable as a snooping biographer. But it is Close who commands every frame she is in and elevates an occasionally bourgeois bore into a banger. A veteran actress conveying deep and abiding emotions, Close may be the unexpected face of the #TimesUp movement in a year full of strong female performances. The film’s quietly observant style is strongest in the pivots – when argument turns to embrace, when adoration descend into disgust. Film buffs will appreciate that Max Irons plays her adult son (Close’s Reversal of Fortune co-star Jeremy Irons is the actor’s dad). Although they are fine actors, Annie Starke and Harry Lloyd as flashback versions of the central couple can’t quite compete with the master class shadows Close and Pryce cast. Not quite as revelatory or rousing as it often intends, the film is unquestionably lifted by Close’s every contribution and her strong choices about pacing and piercing to the heart of a given situation. In more ways than one, her time has come. It’s her world against his.