It’s a man’s world, and Zazie Beetz is, more often than not, the only woman in it.

“I feel like I often play a woman in a male-dominated world,” she tells Inverse. “Maybe because I come across as strong, or I don’t know if I have a masculine energy. Maybe it is an element of being an other, which I think we probably all feel.”

A quick scan of her career confirms as much. Audiences first met Beetz in Atlanta, her breakout role as the female lead of Donald Glover’s surreal FX comedy. In Deadpool 2, she plays the lone female team member of Deadpool’s hastily assembled Task Force X — and its lone survivor apart from the Merc with a Mouth. And in a new Black Mirror episode, “Mazey Day,” she plays a struggling female paparazzo who has to fend off cutthroat male rivals for a million-dollar scoop.

The flourishes you’d expect from a Wes Anderson film are all visible in Asteroid City. However, they arrive with a renewed sense of thematic precision born from carefully-controlled imprecision, as if Anderson were searching for existential answers through his oft-parodied style. It’s one of the best films in Anderson’s recent oeuvre, but its success lies in its ability to create meaning not just on the surface, but far beneath it, in a place the camera seldom goes.

It's likely to come off as thematically opaque to some viewers, if not outright inaccessible. However, it’s also Anderson’s most disarmingly spiritual film in some time, born from an absurdist approach to grief, wrapped in layers of fiction-within-fiction to soften the blow.