Director and screenwriter J Blakeson’s new film I Care a Lot, starring Rosamund Pike (who just won a Golden Globe for the role), follows the journey of a Massachusetts con artist who steals elderly people’s assets by becoming their legal guardian — before finding herself caught in the web of another criminal mastermind.

“The idea first came to me because I was reading news stories about these predatory guardians in America, and the stories were just sort of awful and horrifying and disturbing,” Blakeson told Rolling Stone‘s The Breakdown. “But they were something I couldn’t get out of my head, like a shard of glass stuck in there that was sort of festering for a while. That was brewing in my head, and at the same time, I’d always wanted to make a film about an ambitious woman who’s sort of ruthlessly driven and ambitious. And so these two ideas coalesced into one.”