In 2014, Gillian Flynn adapted her novel for the screen and turned Gone Girl into an international success. This year, her screenplay for Widows is among the best of the year.

By the time Gone Girl was released in theaters in October 2014, Gillian Flynn was already the author to three novels, including Sharp Objects and Dark Places. Her latest work, Gone Girl, was a massive hit; the novel sold over two million copies and spent eight weeks atop the New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestseller list. Naturally, the rights to the book were quickly purchased by 20th Century Fox.

When Gone Girl was released into theaters, the final product was revealed to be a masterful work of filmmaking. Directed by David Fincher and starring Rosamund Pike (who would go on to earn an Oscar nomination), Gone Girl was one of the year’s best movies. It offered a twisted tale of marriage and misandry, functioning simultaneously as a commentary on gender roles and expectations, a critique of media coverage of high profile murder cases, and a wickedly entertaining melodrama. The quality of the movie was elevated in large part by a confident and controlled script penned by Gillian Flynn herself.

It’s no small feat adapting a novel for the screen, not to mention adapting your own novel. The two mediums, although borrowing and trading from one another constantly, are dramatically different; whereas one is built on words, the other is founded on images. With her intimate knowledge of the source material, Gillian Flynn’s script telegraphed the story of Nick and Amy Dunne perfectly for the screen.

Despite being what was clearly one of the best scripts of the year, Gillian Flynn missed earning an Oscar nomination. Instead, far less accomplished yet more traditional scripts for familiar (a.k.a. boring) Oscar fare like American Sniper, The Imitation Game, and The Theory of Everything were nominated. This year, however, Gillian Flynn has a renewed chance at earning that beloved industry prize with her screenplay for Widows.

Widows, director Steve McQueen’s first film since his Best Picture winning 12 Years a Slave, is a deceptively simple movie: Four men are dead after a failed robbery leaving their wives, now widows (wink wink), on the hook to deliver $2 million to a group of criminals that threaten their lives.

Like Gone Girl, Widows is an adapted screenplay, not an original one. This time, however, the source material is a British television series of the same name from 1983. This presents an interesting challenge, namely the need to fit and adapt a story that was originally told over nearly a dozen hours, rather than a mere two.

Together with co-writer Steve McQueen, Gillian Flynn strips the story down to its essentials, zeroing in on the elements that make Widows such a visually and thematically rich movie. Building the movie up around a single heist that the widows must, not can, pull off raises the dramatic stakes of the movie while helping to create a more open-and-shut narrative rather than one that might be stretched out over several hours.

Moreover, McQueen’s film weaves an explicit socio-political narrative into the story. Whereas the original film focused solely on the widows, the film takes a more divided approach. While the widows plot to steal the money they need to survive, a separate yet parallel narrative takes form around a campaign for alderman of a precinct in Chicago’s South Side. One candidate hails from a political dynasty whose family has run the area for decades, the other is a local man with connections to the crime world who is tired of seeing his home run by people that do not represent him.

This plot, combined with the widows’ heist, makes for a very full, almost exhausting movie. At any given time, the script is juggling not one or two, but a half dozen characters whose plots all intersect and intertwine in increasingly complex ways. What Gillian Flynn gets right, however, is that the movie demands a character-centered approach; every introduction of a new plot development works in conjunction with an advancement in the emotional landscape and character growth of one or more of the leading players.

And there are plenty of players. Widows boasts one of the biggest ensemble casts of the year including Viola Davis, Colin Farrell, Michelle Rodriguez, Daniel Kaluuya, Elizabeth Debicki, Brian Tyree Henry, Cynthia Erivo, Jacki Weaver, Liam Neeson, Carrie Coon, and more. Not a single character, not even those with a scene or two of screen time, are treated as ancillary.

One of the side effects of this is, naturally, that the movie feels a bit like it’s moving too quickly. With a run time of only 2 hours and 9 minutes, it’s hard to imagine that there weren’t several longer versions of Widows before it was released. So much of the film feels fully formed thanks to a well crafted script that those moments that don’t work take on a sense of incompleteness; it’s less that these elements don’t work and more that the movie isn’t letting them.

Regardless of any potential tradeoffs, the final product still stands as an impressive movie. On one hand, it fills a desire for a pulse-pounding popcorn action movie with rewarding twists and turns. On the other, however, Widows is a far more difficult movie that interrogates the transactional nature of both private and public relationships at the intersection of money and violence, politics and privilege.

This all culminates with grace under Gillian Flynn’s fine writing. Her voice is a perfect fit for this story; her knack for creating characters of compelling depth and intricacies enhances the dramatic stakes in the movie and the audiences’ investment.

Gone Girl allowed us to inhabit Amy Elliot Dunne’s brain, giving life to one of the most fascinating protagonists (or villain, depending on your perspective) in recent fiction. Widows crafts a much similar feeling, but this time around several different characters. Viola Davis, Elizabeth Debicki, and Daniel Kaluuya stand out among the rest, giving performances that change the entire atmosphere and momentum of a scene when they enter the frame. It’s remarkable to watch, especially since Gillian Flynn’s script is so integral to the parts they play.

There’s something familiar, a faint connection perhaps, between both Gone Girl and Widows. One of the most memorable lines in the movie, so fantastically delivered that of course they put it in the trailer, is delivered by Viola Davis: “The best thing we have going for us is being who we are. Because no one thinks we have the balls to pull this off.”

This line from Widows could work perfectly as a tagline for Gone Girl. See, both Gillian Flynn’s scripts share the unique quality of pinning the entire conceit of a film on the fact that men, come hell or high water, will always underestimate women. What happens when women are underestimated? Well…read something, anything, written by Gillian Flynn.

Widows is not a perfect movie, but it gave us a new screenplay from one of the most exciting new talents in Hollywood today. If Widows and Gone Girl are any sign of what’s to come, we should all be lining up now to buy our tickets for what Gillian Flynn does next.