Connor (Gabriel Basso) is going nowhere: Dead-end job, no real footing in the world, and a growing fixation on Nika (Courtney Eaton), a live-streaming influencer who has no idea he exists. He starts reshaping himself around her: lifting weights, learning to shoot guns and building a version of himself he thinks she'd want. His colleague Morgan (Rain Spencer) is the only thing keeping him tethered to reality, but she's losing her grip.

Basso, best known as the lead of Netflix's global phenomenon The Night Agent, makes his directorial debut on a script he wrote and the control he brings to both jobs is striking. The film builds its tension quietly and deliberately, a slow-burn character study that hardens into something genuinely unnerving before detonating in a final act nobody will see coming. Kiernan Shipka (Mad Men) and Noah Centineo (Warfare) round out a stacked cast. Dark, precise and unsettling in the way that only the best psychological thrillers are, Iconoclast is a debut that announces a filmmaker with something real to say.—Jarod Neece