Miranda Priestly is coming back — and Meryl Streep has just made clear, in the specific and quietly terrifying way that only someone who has already done it once at a level nobody has matched before or since can make clear, that what she is bringing to the sequel is not a victory lap and not a nostalgia exercise and not the comfortable, audience-pleasing reprise that a lesser actress might offer to the people who have been asking for this since 2006.

What she is bringing is something considerably more dangerous than any of that — a fully evolved, fully committed, fully unleashed version of the most iconic villain in fashion film history, informed by twenty years of thinking about who Miranda Priestly is and where she has been and what the world has done to a woman like her in the intervening decades, and delivered with the kind of total, uncompromising creative investment that Meryl Streep brings to the roles that genuinely interest her and that makes everyone who shares a frame with her simultaneously grateful and terrified. The cast and the director who have spent time on set with her in the early days of production have been saying the same thing in different words — that what Meryl Streep is doing with Miranda Priestly in this film is not what anyone expected, that she has found dimensions in the character that the first film only gestured toward, and that the audience sitting down to watch The Devil Wears Prada 2 thinking they know what they are in for is going to discover, approximately thirty seconds after Miranda Priestly first appears on screen, that they had absolutely no idea