Being a successful grifter requires a rare combination of empathy and heartlessness: an ability to understand a mark's emotional needs, a willingness to exploit those needs regardless of the cost, and the capacity to make it all convincing. These seemingly contradictory skills make con-artist roles into meaty material for actors, and as a woman of veiled motives, Nicole Kidman—continuing the string of remarkable performances that have followed Eyes Wide Shut—finds plenty of fodder in the long-delayed Birthday Girl. A grimy thriller with a wicked streak of humor, the film drops Kidman, playing a hard-smoking Russian mail-order bride, in the middle of a sleepy English city. Speaking no English, and frugal with her Russian, Kidman sets up housekeeping with Ben Chaplin, a meek bank clerk who uses the banking profession's long, demanding hours to excuse his unconventional method of finding a spouse. Life behind the counter has served to file away any edges to his personality, which makes it out of character that he mustered the courage to send away for a bride at all. Or so it would seem. The genre chosen by writer-director Jez Butterworth and his brother, co-writer Tom Butterworth, practically requires Kidman to be something other than she first appears, but the same machinations bring out unexpected reserves in Chaplin's mouse of a man. Much of the pleasure of Birthday Girl comes from watching Kidman and Chaplin try to figure each other out. But the process is greatly accelerated by the arrival of two Russian friends, affable Vincent Cassel and gruff Mathieu Kassovitz, who turn up unexpectedly at Chaplin's home to celebrate Kidman's birthday. From there, Butterworth trots his cast through a series of twists and turns which may seem typical, but any familiarity is offset by the play between the film's leads, as well as a nice sense of the unglamorous England just up the M1 from London. Butterworth makes the locale appear so dull, and Chaplin seems to be such an unhappy product of it, that getting drawn into a potentially deadly web of intrigue and deception seems vastly preferable to his otherwise drab existence. While the web itself may seem like a hand-me-down, Kidman and Chaplin's journey through it is always worth revisiting.