Before Steve McQueen’s new film Widows ran the festival circuit, there was a big unknown about the project. How easily could an art-house director like McQueen make the jump to a big, action-oriented picture? This isn’t to say the director wasn’t a capable or versatile filmmaker – his previous works like Hunger, Shame, and 12 Years a Slave were all critically acclaimed, deeply affecting movies. It was more that directing action setpieces is a different skill set from the quiet dramas and gallery-oriented film art that McQueen had made before, a style that can lead people astray.

I needn’t have worried. Widows strides onto the screen with the confidence of a filmmaker who has been making tight crime thrillers for his entire career. Everything about it – the cast, the script, the pacing, and more – moves in lockstep, delivering exactly the kind of experience promised by its logline: a female-led heist film with some of the best performers in the business.

The film begins, true to the tradition of film noir, with a job gone wrong. A four-man team of thieves led by Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) botch a robbery of Jamal Manning, a Chicago crime boss (Brian Tyree Henry), and are killed in the aftermath. With the money destroyed, Manning still needs $2 million to finance his campaign for alderman against the frontrunner, Jack Mulligan (a charmingly corrupt Colin Farrell). Out of options, Manning decides to menace Rawlings’ widow Veronica (Viola Davis) for the money, threatening to kill her if she doesn’t pay up in two weeks’ time.

Despite her long relationship with Rawlings, Veronica doesn’t know the first thing about pulling off a heist. So she turns to the other widows of Rawlings’ crewmembers: Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki). Between them, they plot to use Rawlings’ meticulous plan for his next heist to steal enough money to get Manning off their backs, though they must also contend with Manning’s psychotic brother Jatemme (Daniel Kaluuya), who has plans of his own.

The size and skill of Widows’ cast is enough to mesmerize on its own, but once you get a grasp of the various threads, it’s fascinating to watch how McQueen tightens each one in turn, until he can yank one and let the whole thing unspool. Most importantly, McQueen allows plenty of time to build up each of the three widows and explore their different motivations for pursuing the heist.

Veronica is like the wealthy boss of the operation: she lives in a penthouse, has a personal driver, carries her Scottish terrier with her everywhere, and generally treats her co-conspirators like her employees. But this masks a loss in her past that proves to be a rather timely connection to real-world events. Meanwhile, Linda is an overwhelmed mother of two whose dress boutique is in financial trouble, and Alice is a woman with no education who turns to escort work to support herself. Each woman comes into the heist affected in different ways by the loss of her husband, but the unifying factor is that they all need a lot of money, fast.

The fun part is watching how they piece together the essential elements of a successful heist using talents they didn’t know they had, but which will be familiar to anyone who knows the genre. Veronica is the visionary and keeps everyone in line, Linda provides an essential contact to fill out their roster, and Alice charms her way into acquiring the vehicle, the weapons and the blueprints the team needs.

McQueen makes us wait a long time for the culmination of the plans, and when the heist finally takes place, it does so in a plausibly short window of time. Unlike an Ocean’s movie, the actual crime is dwarfed by the amount of preparation and rehearsal that Veronica and her team undergo – although Widows does take some cues from the Ocean’s series in the moments of humour it includes.

The film, however, doesn’t mark a complete shift by McQueen into pure-entertainment filmmaking. True to his background in socially-conscious projects, there are hints of harsh realism that help ground the story. One is the aforementioned loss of a family member that Veronica suffers, and then more broadly, there’s the race for alderman between Mulligan and Manning. Mulligan’s family has a long history running the ward, even though the ward is predominantly black and the Mulligans are white. Manning’s candidacy seems like a chance to break this trend, but his criminal enterprises make him just as corrupt as Mulligan. Widows suggests that the only corrective to this is Veronica’s Robin-Hood style justice, which is easy to root for in the absence of a “noble cop” character.

All of this adds up to Widows being one of the best mid-budget, theatrically-released thrillers this year, a category that feels perpetually in danger in the era of Marvel and Netflix. It’s also an example of what critics mean when they ask for better roles for women: lead characters who aren’t hard-nosed male proxies, but people with simple motivations and familiar vulnerabilities. So give Steve McQueen all the action movies he wants to make; the industry needs him.

Widows gets four stars out of four.

Stray thoughts

• Kaluuya is terrifying as Jatemme; after playing a series of sympathetic characters in his recent work, it’s great to see him change things up.

• Someone please add Robert Duvall’s outburst at Colin Farrell to the next movie insult supercut!

• As great as the movie is, I can see it getting lots of nominations but the Oscars, but it may not net many wins.