It’s Jackie Kennedy like you’ve never seen her before! That may sound like some hack blurb from a movie trailer, but in Pablo Larraín’s new film Jackie, which premiered here in Toronto on Sunday night, it’s also, y’know, true. We really haven’t, or at least I haven’t, seen a portrait of the most famous First Lady (before Hillary Clinton, anyway) like this one.

Larraín’s film, shot in spare 16-mm, is looping and dizzy, sad and intimate. Noah Oppenheim’s script, mulling faith and fame and the death of an American fantasy, has a lamenting poetry to it. Mica Levi’s score—her second feature film after her eerie, otherworldly work in Under the Skin—is once again strange and a little frightening, sudden swells of plaintive strings mixing discordantly, but effectively, with all the 1960s period detail. Jackie is an odd, artful psychological study, one that blends stony seriousness with whispers of camp. I wasn’t alive back then, nor was Larraín, but he captures a feverish desolation that I’d imagine much of the country felt in the days immediately after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. (That tight time frame houses nearly the entire film.) Jackie’s strangeness gets at the heart of something that feels very real.

Oh, right, and there’s Natalie Portman as the grieving, shellshocked First Lady. Her presence in the movie is probably the biggest draw for many, and it is indeed a fascinating, deeply committed performance—to use another hackneyed cliché, you can’t take your eyes off of her. When talking about Portman after the premiere last night, I kept calling her performance “huge,” which people took to mean over-the-top or inhumanly outsize. It’s not. But it’s expansive and detailed and rendered with intensity, the most invigorating and significant piece of acting she’s done since 2010’s Black Swan. (To be fair, she hasn’t acted all that much since then.) You can maybe see a bit too much of the work in places, but in a way that’s what makes the performance all the more interesting.

It’s very much akin to what Drew Barrymore did in Grey Gardens, one of the best-acted films of the past 10 years. (And yet it kinda got forgotten or dismissed by many.) Obviously, the Beales of East Hampton were relatives of Jackie’s, sporting the same aristocratic East Coast accent, haunted by the same air of fading empire. So Barrymore and Portman reflect one another in that respect; both turns are mannered and convincing and indelible. (I’d say Barrymore wins in the accent department, but only by a little.)

In a deeper way, though, Portman’s exceptional focus in the role is what makes it most similar to Barrymore’s performance. These two actresses, both children of the Hollywood system, work very hard as adults to go past mimicry in order to understand an inner truth about women surrounded by privilege, swallowed up by legacy. They figure it out, and what results is a transformation. We’re still very much watching Natalie Portman in Jackie, as we’re also watching Drew Barrymore in Grey Gardens, but they’ve nonetheless fully entered into something, passed through to a different plane, changing themselves in the process. It’s performance as crucible. It’s exciting, and a little unnerving.