Pedro Pascal makes his Oscar case with a cello in 'Behemoth!'

Pedro Pascal is making his Oscar case with a cello. Behemoth!, Tony Gilroy's first film as a director since The Bourne Legacy in 2012, world-premiered on Friday night at Alice Tully Hall as the centerpiece of the New York Film Festival — and Variety's awards editor is already calling it the breakthrough his movie career has been waiting for.

Pascal plays Alex Serian, a former child prodigy from a family of Los Angeles studio musicians who returns home after 20 years on tour to record Hollywood film scores. He never over-explains Alex's memories. They come through in looks, pauses and subtle shifts in posture.

Pascal offers a beautiful, internalized performance that ranks among his best work on film.

Variety notes it's the first time a director has built a movie on what happens across Pascal's face when nobody is talking. Gilroy structures the film around flashbacks: each time Alex sits down to play the opening cue of a different score, the music sends him back to the people who made him flee.

The role inverts Pascal's usual trajectory. He was nearly 40 when Game of Thrones made Oberyn Martell one of television's most beloved — and most short-lived — characters, followed by Narcos, The Mandalorian and The Last of Us. On that ascent he became an internet favorite, and the worry was that audiences would stop at the charm.

Nine composers, one score race

Gilroy recruited nine composers — Michael Abels, Emily Bear, Lukas Frank, Michael Giacchino, James Newton Howard, Henry Jackman, Nami Melumad, Brandon Roberts and Alan Silvestri — each scoring a different fictional film inside the film. The result is a soundtrack that moves across eras and genres the way Alex's memory does, and a side story for anyone who follows the Oscar score race, where Giacchino already has a statuette from Up.

Olivia Wilde also gets a scene-stealing turn as the ex Alex can't quite shake, devouring every frame; Variety hears echoes of Cameron Diaz's obsessed Vanilla Sky character, though the Academy passed on Diaz for that one in the end. The first verdict out of the festival: the quiet kind of performance Pascal gives rarely arrives with this much heat.