You might think of “Beautiful Creatures” as just another “Twilight” wannabe. I prefer to think of it as the showcase that a great British actress has been waiting for.

The biggest surprise of the latest supernatural sensation isn’t the odd new girl, her even odder uncle, glass suddenly and dangerously breaking in a small-town high school classroom or the innocent seductiveness of its young actors. No, it’s that this movie, based on the first of the Southern gothic young adult novels in a series by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, gives Emma Thompson her meatiest role in many years.