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This weekend sees the release of the twisty, tropical-scented thriller Serenity, starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jason Clarke, and Diane Lane in a story about … well, that’s a good question. It’s about obsession and desire and manipulation, with MaConaughey playing the burnt-out captain of a fishing vessel who is approached by Hathaway, the unhappy wife of a violent man (Clarke). She wants McConaughey’s help in killing him. And things just get progressively more twisted from there.

It’s the perfect kind of movie if you’re an Anne Hathaway fan, because it allows her to take on a darker, more morally ambiguous role. She’s not necessarily the villain … but she might be. And that, believe it or not, is the Anne Hathaway sweet spot.

That’s not something you’d expect from the way Hathaway’s career kicked off, with a celebrated turn in The Princess Diaries, followed by more princessy adventures in Ella Enchanted and The Princess Diaries 2. Her big grown-up breakthrough, The Devil Wears Prada, cast Hathaway as a virtuous working girl tempted by the life of a power executive. Her big Oscar triumph in Les Miserables was for a role so literally sainted that her character comes back as a spirit to usher Hugh Jackman into heaven (heaven being a place where Aaron Tveit sings in your face forever).

But the truth is, iconic role and Oscars aside, Anne Hathaway the actress is at her most impressive when there’s darkness on the horizon. That can mean the femme fatale looking to arrange a murder and using her greatest weapon (her sexuality!) as she does in Serenity. It can mean the morally compromised Selina Kyle who she played to truly underrated effect in The Dark Knight Rises. Catwoman isn’t all bad or all good, and ultimately she ends up helping Batman rise up against Bane, but her true loyalties are always in doubt.

But Hathaway doesn’t even need to be playing a strict villain in order to benefit from a darker character. One of her earliest respect-garnering roles was as Jake Gyllenhaal’s embittered wife in Brokeback Mountain. At the time, regrettably, most of the attention sent Hathaway’s way was over whether she went topless in the film or not. But the most important scene was that phone call, where her grief over what she lost with her husband is clouded by the anger she feels over being deceived. It’s some of the best acting in that great film.

Hathaway’s first Oscar nomination came for Rachel Getting Married, in a role that was all about a struggle between darkness and light, inner demons and better natures. Hathaway played the recovering drug addict, Kym, furloughed for the weekend from rehab to attend her sister’s titular wedding. Kym’s virulent self-centeredness, as even she makes gestures towards amends, is a fascinating piece of undulating character work, and in a strictly merit-based world, she’d have won the Oscar that year.

It feels like it’s taken a while for the culture to settle on how we feel about Anne Hathaway. She’s was an exciting new talent, then an exhausting try-hard theater kid, then an overly hated underdog, and only now it seems like we’re free to appreciate her on equitable terms. And with that level playing field, I have to say, keep playing vain actresses who are secretly in on the scam (as she does in Ocean’s Eight) or manipulative exes with deadly agendas (Serenity), or, as has recently been announced, the grand high witch in Robert Zemeckis’s remake of The Witches. Live in that quasi-darkness, Anne Hathaway. We love you there.