It’s tempting, if rather tiresome, to look for social commentary on the current, fractured state of the US in whatever piece of culture that comes our way. A cursory glance at any coverage of the small screen adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, aka The Show We Need Right Now™, will have made you boringly aware of this. But given that we’re yet to truly see the effect that the newly elected president will have on the creative direction of screenwriters, it’s mostly redundant to grasp at straws this early on.

But Mike White, who has quietly been writing some of the sharpest films (and one of the most underrated TV shows) of the past 15 years, has constructed the script for his latest film with a sort of psychic foreshadowing. It’s a savage takedown of ugly white privilege but, as with some of his richest work (The Good Girl, Year of the Dog, Enlightened), Beatriz at Dinner is also a character study of a woman who might have been pushed to the sidelines as tragicomic support in another, less sensitively realized film.

Beatriz (Salma Hayek) is a Mexican holistic healer and masseuse living in California whose quiet life, governed by a respect for the environment and those around her, is suddenly interrupted in a week that tests her patience and empathy. It starts with a gruesome discovery: her pet goat cruelly strangled by a neighbor, an ominous reminder that her way of life remains at odds with the country she’s now living in.

Her bad luck continues as she heads to an affluent Newport Beach neighborhood to provide a massage for wealthy client Cathy (Connie Britton) and her car won’t start as she tries to leave, her mechanic friend unable to arrive for hours. It’s an awkward situation, yet Cathy considers Beatriz a friend of sorts as she helped her daughter deal with cancer as a teenager. Cathy’s prepping for a dinner party and invites Beatriz to join them, much to the displeasure of her husband, Grant (David Warshofsky).

They’re hosting two other couples, both linked via Grant’s job and spearheaded by powerful real estate mogul Doug (John Lithgow). What starts out as a touch of biting debate turns into something far darker as Beatriz finds her calmly maintained worldview challenged by Doug’s monstrous lack of consideration for those outside his capitalist bubble.

Once screenwriters have had time to truly comprehend and comment on the advent of Donald Trump, we can surely expect an endless conveyor belt of crude analogies or even direct portrayals (one shudders at the thought of American Horror Story: Election – an actual thing coming later this year). But there’s an elegance in White’s screenplay, shying away from clear moral divisions: it’s more complicated than poor v rich equating to good v evil. Beatriz’s behavior escalates as she’s confronted by ever increasing levels of awfulness and we’re forced to question whether her response is well suited to the situation at hand.

And this is where a truly great dinner party movie rises or falls, with its effective grasp of social choreography. It’s what made Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and, more recently, Karyn Kusama’s dread-filled thriller The Invitation so effective. White, and director/frequent collaborator Miguel Arteta, handle the intricacies of the evening without resorting to simple “fish out of water” comedy. The cast are all exquisitely matched, the tension of their interplay simmering throughout, but it’s down to Hayek and Lithgow to duke it out and their intense discussion makes for a fascinating and provocative duel.

Hayek, so often stuck playing oversexed ciphers, delivers a gloriously judged performance, possibly her best yet, her warm optimism in the face of adversity mournfully replaced with outrage. Lithgow is a worthy adversary – we’ve seen him play similar – and they’re both ably supported by Britton as well as Chloë Sevigny and Transparent siblings Jay Duplass and Amy Landecker.

Given the film’s focus on one location, there’s a risk of staginess but the conversation consistently thrills and its timeliness never once feeling clumsy. There’s wit here but also melancholy, a woman who believes in helping others encountering someone who cannot be helped, whose career is based on the exact opposite. It’s in the film’s shocking gut-punch of a climax that this sadness turns into something far more horrifying, a final haunting note that serves as a bleak reminder of increasing division, a growing disrespect of the environment and even the difficulty of the immigrant experience in America. This isn’t the film we need right now, that’s a meaningless statement, but it’s a film that we deserve to watch, discuss and be grateful for.