It’s a great relief that Suffragette isn’t a showy, glamorized, romantic period piece meant to wow us with its pretty locales and intricate costume design. The British suffragettes of the early 20th century deserve a more honest, grounded depiction than that, and that’s what director Sarah Gavron and writer Abi Morgan deliver. Their version of the suffragette movement is violent, thrilling and dirty. These women put everything on the line in the name of justice and equality, shattering windows and blowing up mailboxes at the risk of losing their jobs and families. Women may have won the right to vote here and in Britain a long time ago, but the tragedy is that many of the injustices the suffragettes rallied against in the past still stand strong today.

We see the movement through the eyes of Maud (Carey Mulligan), a working woman with a husband, Sonny (Ben Wishaw), and a son, George (Adam Michael Dodd). Maud’s not taken from the history books—she’s a composite of Morgan and Gavron’s research on suffragettes of the time, particularly those in the middle class. At the story’s outset she exists outside the suffragette circle, accepting of her lot working at a musty laundry where she’s sexually abused by her boss. Her inner activist is ignited when she sees suffragettes carrying out minor acts of vandalism all around East London in their fight for equal voting rights.

Almost by accident, Maud is recruited by her co-worker Violet (Anne-Marie Duff) and is further inspired by Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham Carter), a suffragist leader who holds secret meetings in the pharmacy she runs. Leading the larger suffragist charge as figurehead is Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep), who gives Maud a jumpstart of empowerment and inspiration (we see her only briefly, but Streep knows how to make her minutes count). The women may not have a voice in parliament, but they’ve got bravery and conviction to spare.

As she gets caught up in suffragist activities, Maud begins to realize the true scale of her sacrifice for the movement. She’s thrown in jail (where she’s force-fed—a gruesome scene) and villainized by most of her community, and Sonny hasn’t the patience or understanding to tolerate her new life’s mission. He kicks her out of their tiny flat and forbids her from seeing George, leaving her fellow female foot soldiers as her only allies.

Mulligan has a gift that allows her to embody strength and delicateness at the same time, and few roles would be better served by her talents than that of Maud. Heartrending are the scenes in which Maud sneaks George away from school to spend a few precious hours of quality time; you can see joy and anguish in equal parts on Mulligan’s face as Maud savors her time with her son. Also great are Mulligan’s scenes with Brendan Gleeson, who plays a detectie heading up a suffragette surveillance operation. He’s the only almost-sympathetic figure on the oppressor’s side of the story (he empathizes with the suffragettes but ultimately does nothing to help them), though the film never ham-fistedly villainizes the men in the story. Other filmmakers might have made the story about some sort of ethical awakening on the men’s side, but Gavron and Morgan are more tasteful than that; their story is about the women’s fight for justice, period.

There’s no effort to show off the film’s elaborate production design in a Hollywood-y way by Gavron, and that’s one of the film’s strengths. Every bit of East London we see looks detailed and painstakingly designed, but the characters are always the focus, which results in a more immersive period experience. This is the first movie ever to be allowed to film at the UK’s Houses of Parliament, and the filmmakers don’t squandor the opportunity by giving the location center stage. It’s the sign of a film made with dignity and care.

The thing working against Suffragette is that it’s not quite as rousing as you’d think it would be. It’s admirable in the way it respects the dark days these heroes endured to pave the way for future generations, but there’s something about the tone and pace of the movie that lacks an overarching sense of force and activist aggression, something a movie so unenamored with style could have done better with. On the other hand, I’ll take a melancholic but respectful historical drama over a glitzy, Oscar-bait-y one any day.

Following The Imitation Game last year and Captain Phillips in 2013, Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette has set its European premiere date for opening night of the 59th BFI London Film Festival. A story of women fighting for women’s rights at the end of the 19th century, the feminist drama will debut on Wednesday, October 7th at the Odeon Leicester Square with simultaneous screenings taking place throughout the UK. With Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter as well as Meryl Streep in main roles, Suffragette is among the most highly anticipated films slated to come out in 2015.

Along with the news of its BFI London Film Fest premiere date, Suffragette has revealed two new look slightly different looks into surprisingly explosive upcoming film. Mulligan plays Maud, a working wife and mother who gets swept up by the foot soldiers of a growing feminist movement. Bonham Carter and Streep play fellow members of the movement, while villainous authority figure Brendan Gleeson seeks to dismantle their organization. Fancy period costumes are abound. The two newly released trailers have overlap, though the UK trailer is less ham-fisted in its unveiling of information.

Suffragette is scheduled to be released in New York and Los Angeles on October 23rd, expanding to more cities in the following weeks. While its BFI London Film Fest premiere is scheduled for October 7th, it’s worth noting that the gala has been advertised as Suffragette‘s “European Premiere,” leaving the door open for an appearance at a North American-set fall film festival.

Watch the first trailer here

Check out the Suffragette UK trailer below:

Advice: sometimes going into a film knowing almost nothing about it is NOT the way to go. After having only seen the trailer to The Grand Seduction, I made a major assumption that the film was set in Ireland (based on lead actor Brendan Gleeson‘s thick accent), I was getting ready to harshly condemn the other actors for their haphazard and lazy attempts at Irish accents (I mean, I knew they weren’t American) when it finally dawned on me that the film was set in Canada. Turns out Newfoundland looks a lot like Ireland and has the same sort of small fishing harbors I associate with Ireland. So I guess I can’t use bad accents as a strike against The Grand Seduction, however the film tallies up enough other offenses to show it’s a half-hearted attempted at a cutesy idea.

Director Don McKellar (a Canadian darling, wow am I unobservant), who’s written a few good films including The Red Violin, as well as acted in plenty of film and television, probably should have helped write this film, one of his first feature film directorial endeavors. The comedy is a remake of the 2003 French film titled La Grande Séduction directed by Jean-Francois Pouliot and written by Ken Scott, who co-wrote the updated version with Michael Dowse. Their first mistake was not realizing a title change would have done them heaps of good as The Grand Seduction reeks of drama.

The film takes place in Tickle Cove where the townspeople are no longer able to fish, the pride of their past endeavors, and instead now line up to collect welfare and reminisce about the good old days. When the town is given the chance to be the location for a new factory, Murray French (Gleeson) sees their chance at revival. Of course there is a catch: for the factory to move into town they need a full-time doctor on hand. Queue Doctor Lewis (Taylor Kitsch) whose big city bad boy ways have landed him in a pickle. He agrees to spend a month in Tickle Cove as their doctor. Thus begins the townspeople’s grand scheme to woo Dr. Lewis into making Tickle Cove his home.

Murray and his old friend Simon (Gordon Pinsent) lead the scheming by tapping Dr. Lewis’s phone and recording his every conversation with his ties back home. They gather the townspeople to collectively learn cricket, the Dr’s favorite sport, and Murray tries unsuccessfully to convince the sole young woman of the town, Kathleen (Liane Balaban), to flirt a bit with the young doctor. As the month progresses the town goes to greater lengths to manipulate the doctor into wishing to stay on in the town, while the factory makes further demands of Murray to secure the bid.

Filled with the sort of small town jokes that never grow tiresome, The Grand Seduction is so utterly light and playful it’s hard not to join in the laughs. That said, it evokes plenty of eye-rolls as it shirks modern flourishes, bordering on sexist in its old-fashioned worldview. These small annoyances are easy to shirk when laughing, however blatant plot holes are a bit harder to ignore. Liane Balaban’s Kathleen is the sort of sharp-witted female character that would seem to perfectly balance Dr. Lewis’s playboy ways if it weren’t so utterly inappropriate that he’s engaged from the outset, and that she is given no real dialogue in which to prove herself anything other than a resistant love interest.

Kitsch arguably is given the least to work with in the film’s writing, coming across as a naïve and flat character. It’s hard not to draw parallels between The Grand Seduction and 1991’s Doc Hollywood with Michael J. Fox. The main difference between the two films, and perhaps the difference between one being good and the other so-so, is that Michael J. Fox’s character is given the time to fall in love with the small town he crash lands in, where Dr. Lewis is literally being tricked into liking Tickle Cove and it’s never truly believable that it should be working so well.

The Grand Seduction lacks the sort of whimsical charm that would take its cutesy laughs and half-formed plot into the realm of classically endearing. It may induce audiences to smile, but all smiles will fade just as quickly as the film fades to black.