Sometimes, it’s the little details that provide the best payoff. They start so innocuously – a flutter in a character’s voice or a bruise on the cheek. Simple touches that are easy enough to overlook, but pay off in the long run. They provide for greater audience joy and reward – treats for paying such close attention.

They’re easy enough to miss and easy to dismiss, after all, they might well be nothing. All the same, they could be harbingers of danger to come…like a twig snapping in the woods, or a shadow in the cloud.

A WAAF officer named Maude Garrett boards a flying fortress in the Pacific Theatre of WWII under mysterious pretenses. Her commission comes from high up the ranks, and she carries with her a mysterious cargo that must be protected and undisturbed. The all-male crew she is joining is in no mood for interlopers and they make no bones about making Officer Garrett feel unwelcome.

Officer Garrett is seated in the bull turret for the flight (the gunner position under the plane’s belly). After she is forced to listen to the crew degrade her over the radio, she begins to see things through the turret’s windows and sights. First, she believes she sees something moving across the wing during take-off…an animal of some sort. Then, she begins to spot other aircraft in the distance.

As Garrett deals with the claustrophobia of her station and the misogyny of the crew, two truths become rapidly clear – what she has seen will start making this bad situation worse in a big hurry.

SHADOW IN THE CLOUD succeeds by remixing a lot of familiar elements into something both fun and badass. It takes an underutilized piece of history like the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and parcels it into buzzy story beats like the mystery box, the underestimated champion, and “Ten Little Indians”. Roseanne Liang’s film plays this remix well – creating an atmospheric nod back to the era, and infusing it with feminist badassery. Her film is economical – knowing how to get maximum-impact from a minimal set. We spend the bulk of the film inside that bull turret with Moretz, with the tight confines making us feel everything from disgust to dread to lion-hearted.

This movie gets the balance of everything just right: knowing when it’s time to call a soldier on his bullshit, and when it’s time to man the guns.