Lola Petticrew became a name to watch with a searing performance as IRA bomber Dolours Price in Say Nothing. The Belfast actor now follows that powerhouse turn with the equally riveting portrayal of a serial killer in the engagingly visceral new thriller Furious (Disney+).Petticrew is Catherine, a killer targeting wealthy men who are revealed to have been part of an Epstein-style circle of abuse in which Catherine was trapped as a young woman. Catherine kills quietly but mercilessly – injecting a victim with a lethal dose of fentanyl in one early scene and then getting one over on a sleazy lawyer who demands she sign an NDA before they are intimate.Furious is loosely based on the pulpy 1987 thriller, Black Widow, in which Theresa Russell played a woman who married millionaires and then bumped them off to inherit their wealth. But in turning it into a post-Epstein-revenge parable, Elizabeth Meriwether has created something entirely new – perhaps the first of a new genre of thriller that reckons with the horrific things we have learned about how rich men treat women. Petticrew is at once menacing and vulnerable: you believe Catherine is both someone who has survived terrible trauma and a person who can kill as if it is the easiest thing in the world.The performance is matched all the way by Emmy Rossum as Alice, the FBI agent leading the hunt for the killer. As with Catherine, she is a victim of abuse – having left her violent police officer partner for a new career in the FBI. But despite her obvious talents as an investigator, she runs smack into the patriarchal glass walls of the Bureau, where her boss would rather deal with cranks on the phone than bring a serial killer to justice.There are echoes of Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, in which Carey Mulligan played a survivor meting out retaliatory justice to the sleazebags of the world. But in place of that film’s manic gonzo energy, Furious hums with the clean-burning purr of a well-put-together procedural – the tension heightened by the decision to show Catherine plotting her kills and Alice and the FBI frantically giving lukewarm pursuit.Furious: Lola Petticrew as Catherine. Photograph: Disney [ Say Nothing: Bingeable yet sober-minded eulogy for the tragedy of the TroublesOpens in new window ]The two leads are gripping, but the engrossing show in its entirety is a credit to Meriwether. The question Furious raises is all about villainy and who the true monsters are: the implacable Catherine or the men whose crimes have earned a place on this avenging figure’s hit list?