Doubt / Doubt, adapted from the Pulizer Prize-winning play by John Patrick Shanley and directed by the same, is a film for actors. When your top-billed stars are Philip Seymour Hoffman (just off another amazing performance from Synecdoche, New York) and Meryl Streep (now forgiven for Mamma Mia!), you can expect impassioned, volatile results. That’s certainly the case here, though given the subject matter it’s surprising that Doubt is so quiet.

Sister Aloysius Beauvier, as played by Streep, is the epitome of the unforgiving nun. She roams the pews and classrooms, slapping misbehaving kids on the back of the head. The most petulant child clams up when put on the receiving end of one of her cold, hard stares. Just the sound of her voice strikes terror in her pupils. Here antithesis is Father Flynn (Hoffman), a New Testament-styled priest ushered in under the Vatican’s reforms in 1964 to be more accessible to the public. Flynn sermonizes on uncertainty, treats his parish with kindness and is welcoming of change and modernity.

These early scenes come dangerously close to caricature, with Streep playing the unfeeling, unflinching battle-axe who despises the trivial, calling cough drops “candy” and seethes at the popularity of ball point pens while Hoffman charms with his smiling demeanor. On the sidelines is Amy Adams as a young nun and teacher out of her league. Eager to appease after being warned by Sister Aloysius to be on the lookout for strange behavior, she reports that the newest student, the first black child admitted, had a private meeting with Flynn.

“So it’s happened,” Streep says with a grim, almost exasperated sigh.

From there, Doubt becomes a battle of wills as Sister Aloysius schemes to have Father Flynn expunged over what could be improper, and what could easily be a case of railroading an innocent simply because she doesn’t like him. “You have no proof,” Hoffman shouts when confronted.

“But I have my certainty,” Streep shoots back.

Shanley’s film, his first since 1990’s Joe Versus the Volcano, is more a treatise on the inequities of gender in the Catholic Church than a potboiler whodunit like The Usual Suspects, despite marketing that suggests otherwise. To expand from the stage version, he’s introduced a few minor characters and numerous outdoor shots of the harsh New York winters blowing change through the holy grounds, while the cinematography by the usually mesmerizing Roger Deakins (No Country for Old Men, The Shawshank Redemption) jars with its harsh angles. But Doubt is a stage play all the way that succeeds because of its actors, particularly Viola Davis as the mother of the child embroiled in the struggle, whose lone scene is the most deserving of Oscar nomination since Beatrice Straight in Network. Her reaction is so extraordinary that any certainty the audience felt previously is devastatingly shattered, along with presumptions. In the end, Doubt gives us exactly that.