Director: Joe Wright, 15, 130min

Stars: Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Romola Garai

On general release

Ambitious in scope but very British in tone, Wright’s absorbing second feature has the hallmarks of an awards darling for the coming season. Adapted from Ian McEwan’s novel by Christopher Hampton, the film captures the grand sweep of the novel’s narrative and the contrasts between prewar privilege and the Second World War, with its privations and destructive waste of life.

Wright is reunited with his Pride and Prejudice star, Knightley, who cuts an iconic image in a figure-skimming green satin dress. As Cecilia, her clipped and brittle delivery belies a torment of conflicting feelings towards Robbie (McAvoy, above), the son of one of her father’s trusted retainers. Cecilia’s 13-year-old sister Briony (played as a child by the impressive Saoirse Ronan), an aspiring writer, sees intrigue everywhere. In retrospect, she is probably not the right person to trust to deliver a message from Robbie to Cecilia. Misinterpreting what she reads and sees, and fabricating something that she claims to have witnessed, Briony tells a destructive lie that wrecks the lives of a young couple whose journey together is just commencing. The ramifications of her act will be with all three until the ends of their lives.

After the close of the first chapter of the story, the film follows all three on their separate paths. Robbie wanders blindly through occupied France with two other soldiers; Cecilia has cut off ties with her family and works as a nurse. And Briony (now played by Garai) is also training to become a nurse while trying to assuage the guilt that mounts with each day.

It is in this second part of the film that Wright’s assured direction really takes hold. There are several outstanding scenes – one, transposed almost exactly from the novel, sees Briony nursing a dying French soldier unaware of the severity of his horrendous injuries. But the most impressive is a five-minute tracking shot that follows the chaos and carnage of the beaches at Dunkirk. Extraordinarily choreographed, the camera stumbles like the numb, shell-shocked soldiers that it follows; in the distance a revelling private dangles from a Ferris wheel, dropping from its highest point to an uncertain fate. On the strength of this one dazzling shot alone, the film should be regarded as one of the best British war films of the past decade, if not longer.

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