The Associated Press

Barbara (Judi Dench) confronts Sheba (Cate Blanchett) in Richard Eyre’s ‘Notes on a Scandal.’ The thriller details Barbara’s attempt to manipulate Sheba into leaving her family and entering a relationship with her using Sheba’s secret sexual relationship with a high school student as leverage. The film has grossed more than $9 million domestically and also earned Oscar nominations for Dench, Blanchett, writer Patrick Marber and Phillip Glass, the film’s composer.

No one gets shoved into a bookcase until the final act of Richard Eyre’s spectacular, scintillating Notes on a Scandal, but the unbearable tension is palpable from the second Judi Dench purrs her first narrated words.

The venerable actress stars as Barbara Covett, a sour-faced, frumpy teacher at a London high school who interprets the shielded disgust of her colleagues as taciturn respect. Short and squat with hastily hidden gray roots, she still manages to look down her nose at everyone — and has her eye out for the beautiful new art teacher, Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett).

Sheba has her hands full: She’s raising two children with her much-older husband (the always reliable Bill Nighy) and her art students have the maturity of 5 year olds. As Sheba finds solace in a furtive, slowly forming friendship with Barbara, she also reaches out elsewhere: A sexual relationship with a 15-year-old student, which stays secret until Barbara peers through the art room window one night.

Scandal could proceed from this shocker with the relative ease of a Lifetime potboiler, Barbara using Sheba’s secret as high-stakes blackmail to get whatever she wants. But playwright and screenwriter Patrick Marber, who wrote Mike Nichols’ 2004 masterpiece Closer, makes it Barbara’s opportunity to manipulate her friendship with Sheba, not destroy it.

Dench plays Barbara as a sad, pitiful woman with a hardened façade, one that slowly crumbles as she begins her bizarre seduction to the strains of Philip Glass’ quivering strings. Marber’s deviously crafted screenplay propels the movie — a refreshingly economical 98 minutes — forward while dipping into the revealing pasts of both women.

Dench’s Barbara is a marvelous pseudo-villain, especially when her suppressed lesbian desires give birth to undaunted malice. But even Sheba, who initially paints herself as a lonely woman weakened by temptation, doesn’t escape the film’s admirable drive to plumb the depths of her indiscretion. In one of several stunning Barbara-Sheba tète-a-tètes, she admits that living a good life for so long gave her a sense of “entitlement” to mess up once.

Unexpected moments of pathos such as that leave no wonder why Dench and Blanchett are in the running at this year’s Academy Awards. Both coming off Best Supporting Actress wins within the past decade, they bring a fascinating urgency to their characters that makes this vicious adult drama strangely fun and darkly funny.

Quite simply, this is great acting, so much so that it makes the movie’s occasionally awkward leaps in logic almost unnoticeable. Some of Barbara’s actions feel vaguely unjustified, as if Marber missed a link here or there, and the movie fades to black on a weak and somewhat predictable scene that’s been done many times before, paling in comparison to the climactic showdown that occurs minutes before.

Of course, those flaws are hard to even remember with the sound of Dench’s beautiful yet bilious narration still ringing in your ears days after you see it.

A gold-star movie, indeed.