The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2011)

An adaptation of a Terence Rattigan play, The Deep Blue Sea gives Rachel Weisz one of her first real opportunities to take centre stage in serious drama as a woman in an austere rationing-era Britain of 1950 who leaves her judge husband for a raffish ex-RAF pilot and fails to find happiness in either life, culminating in a self-recriminating suicide attempt. The strong cast pour their heart and soul into it and the period gloom is a fine emotional mirror of the wife's desperation, but the whole has little to say beyond how hopeless, darling, the way of things is. Too little mannered angst, not enough passion to speak out beyond its time.

5/10