Karen Gillan’s breakout role as Amy Pond, the spirited redhead who accompanied Matt Smith’s Doctor on numerous madcap adventures through time and space on Doctor Who, earned the Scottish actress the love of audiences around the world. Since then, Gillan’s fiery charisma has helped power short-lived sitcoms (the unfortunately titled Selfie) and big-budget blockbusters (Guardians of the Galaxy, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle).

After moving behind the camera for a couple of shorts, Gillan is now making her feature directorial debut with The Party’s Just Beginning, which celebrated its international premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 22. Turns out, Gillan is just as talented behind the camera as she is in front of it – The Party’s Just Beginning is a hauntingly beautiful coming-of-age tale that is equal parts Lady Bird and Morvern Callar and yet entirely its own creature.

Darkness and Light

Gillan stars as Liusaidh, an aimless, self-destructive twenty-something struggling to come to terms with the suicide of her best friend, Alistair (a touching performance from Matthew Beard). She spends her days behind a deli counter slinging cheese and her nights going to clubs, getting blackout drunk, and having sex with whichever man she makes eye contact with first.

Every night on the way home, sloppily inhaling greasy fries as she stumbles her way through the darkened streets of Inverness, Liusaidh can’t help but stop at the bridge where Alistair ended his life. Liusaidh both blames herself for not being able to save Alistair and blames Alistair for leaving her alone to fend for herself in a world where she finds herself unable to connect with anyone else.

Liusaidh ends up forging two unlikely connections that help her keep her head above the murkiness that threatens to swallow her spirit – an elderly man who mistakenly calls Liusaidh’s home thinking it is the local helpline and becomes Liusaidh’s main confidant, and an unhappy Englishman (Gillan’s Guardians of the Galaxy co-star, Lee Pace) who Liusaidh likes enough to actually see more than once, even if she doesn’t know his name.

Both of these men are almost as self-hating as Liusaidh and, through their own struggles, help her realize that she needs to stop feeling sorry for herself and start living again. But her journey to this realization is incredibly painful, and often uncomfortable to watch. Gillan puts herself, as Liusaidh, through the wringer, and the resulting performance is a portrait of manic depression that hits hard.

A Confident Debut

The bleak but often starkly beautiful streets of Inverness – Gillan’s hometown – play as big of a role in The Party’s Just Beginning as Greta Gerwig’s sunny Sacramento neighborhoods do in Lady Bird. (Coincidentally, California is the place to which Liusaidh and Alistair dream of escaping.) Watching Liusaidh return to the same locations over and over again throughout the film gives the audience a sense of the true loneliness of her life; she clearly finds more comfort in these places than she does with other people.

Despite all this unhappiness, The Party’s Just Beginning is still quite funny; Gillan’s script is packed with sharp wit and sarcasm that keep the film from getting too bogged down in the darkness to be tolerable. It’s actually a little too overpacked; most of the storylines are never quite resolved, and while that makes the film feel remarkably true to life, it isn’t always satisfying.

In an unusual but ultimately effective choice, Gillan chooses not to tell Liusaidh’s story entirely in chronological order. The audience gradually learns more and more about her friendship with Alistair and how troubled the young man was – queer in a prejudiced town, in a relationship with a closeted Bible-thumper, and the son of a drug addict – as Liusaidh is slowly forced to come face to face with her memories of Alistair and her role in his life.

The only downside to this is that one only ever sees Alistair through Liusaidh’s eyes; he exists in the film only in her memories, and her memories are only mere glimpses and snippets of what is actually going on in his life. Sometimes she is even peering at him through cracked-open doors, literally only getting part of the whole story of whatever is going on inside the room.

Only getting the outsider’s perspective on such a troubled and complex character can be tough, but it also feels realistic, reminding us that we never know everything that is going on in the lives of even those closest to us.

The Party’s Just Beginning: Conclusion

Bold visual, editing, and musical choices show that despite this being her debut feature, Gillan is a natural storyteller confident in her own style and vision. The Party’s Just Beginning isn’t always fun, but it’s definitely a powerful vehicle for a very talented woman. I look forward to seeing what Gillan does next as both a filmmaker and an actor.