At any given point during Ocean’s 8, you might see a flash of an old Anne Hathaway character. Sometimes, she growls like Catwoman. Other times, she’ll make wide eyes like one of her many ingenues. She struts and she slinks, purses her lips and pouts. We should have known what we were in for when we found out that her character’s name was Daphne Kluger—which perfectly telegraphs her as a narcissistic, big-shot actress.

Daphne is an impeccably calibrated Hollywood parody—a woman whose entire being, down to the mischievous twinkle in her eye, is performance. And as several critics have already noted, Hathaway does not merely steal the show—she runs away with it, in five-inch stilettos and a hot pink dress. What Hathaway brings to this caper is precisely what the movie itself lacks: true unpredictability.

Ocean’s 8 is a capable but obvious echo of the Ocean’s films that came before it—and most of its characters fit pretty neatly into their respective boxes. Debbie (Sandra Bullock) is the cool one; Lou (Cate Blanchett) is the cooler one; Nine Ball (Rihanna) is the stoner-hacker; Sarah Paulson’s Tammy is the bored housewife with a garage full of stolen goods. None of the film’s characterizations feel lazy or worn out because they’re all well executed, but it’s hard to make the case that any member of the team brought anything truly surprising to the table. Daphne, too, appears pretty easy to figure out at first: she’s an over-the-top actress who loves a captive audience almost as much as she loves to look at herself in the mirror while wearing a six-pound diamond necklace. Daphne is a woman whose every move is a pose—a quality that only gets more pronounced as the story unfolds.

I won’t spoil anything here, but let’s just say that although Daphne is the group’s mark, she ends up being much smarter than she initially allows people to believe—and the moment everyone on-screen realizes that is the moment viewers, too, should pause, and consider all the fascinating layers Hathaway gives with this performance. Once Daphne reveals her own secret, it becomes clear that for all her apparent shallowness, she’s always paying just a bit more attention than she lets on. She’s also a woman who is very aware of her place within the larger Hollywood ecosystem: Daphne knows how games are played, and she clearly has not gotten to where she is by accident. Daphne is shrewd, observant, and most delightfully, has a taste for chaos.

That deceptive edge makes Daphne difficult to pin down; her attitude is as mercurial as her fuse is short, and just when you think you’ve got her figured out, she slaps you. (Seriously: she slaps someone, and it’s great.) Everyone else in the film tries to reduce Daphne to the sum of her parts—comparisons run the gamut from Barbie to Bambi, and comments about her eyes and “ample bosom” abound. But in reality, Daphne is much more complicated. It’s all there in the wicked grin she occasionally flashes—or in those knowing smirks she casts just askance of the camera. Not only does Daphne know what she’s doing, but more importantly, at any given time, she’s often the only one who knows.

The role itself is a fun one, but it’s Hathaway’s performance that elevates it to greatness. As someone who has worked as an actress for decades, Hathaway plays Daphne with a careful combination of self-deprecation and reckless abandon. It is not a self-flagellating performance, in which Hathaway apologizes for any of the ire that’s been unfairly heaped upon her in the past; that would have been less fun. Instead, the fun Hathaway is poking at herself also targets the industry more broadly—the actors and creators who gather at dinners like these to pose for cameras, show off their foreign-language skills, swap stories about hobnobbing with royals, and who react to things like diamond theft with comments like, “Do we have to make such a big deal about this?”

It’s a knowing and ridiculous performance that might have been impossible for just about any other actress to pull off—but Hathaway, who has spent most of her adult life in this business (and has been the target of plenty of vitriol for her own alleged too-much-ness), has both the practice and gently sardonic perspective to strike that balance. Most importantly, there’s no question throughout the film that Hathaway is having a ball. There’s perhaps no better proof than when a character tells Daphne that he loves his job sometimes. She leans forward, a coquettish yet innocent grin on her face, and replies, “I love mine, too!”