Starry, sexy and unmistakably British, Atonement is the kind of film that comes along all too rarely. The swell of excitement in the press that followed the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival last week is not misplaced – the director Joe Wright’s follow-up to Pride and Prejudice oozes quality. As the society swan Cecilia Tallis, Keira Knightley has never looked more iconic than she does in the chic, slouchy fashions of the mid 1930s; the clipped, brittle accent of the period suits her chalky Englishness. Her lover, the housekeeper’s son Robbie, is played by James McAvoy, quietly affecting as the young man whose bright future is crushed by one massive, malicious lie.

Sensitively adapted from Ian McEwan’s novel, the film is true to the book’s sweeping scope and to the voice of its terminally unreliable narrator. Wright twice repeats key scenes to skew our perception of them – each time we first see them through the blinkered eyes of 13-year-old Briony Tallis, then we get a more adult perspective. It’s a simple device, but utterly effective.

Briony as a child is played by the brilliant newcomer Saoirse Ronan. She pounds out flights of fantasy on her manual typewriter. The score, by Dario Marinelli, takes the clattering beats of the typewriter keys and runs with them – a musical motif for Briony’s overheated imagination. But it’s not her imagination that destroys the hope of happiness for her sister, but a wholly conscious act of deceit. This lie is the crux of the story; it’s also responsible for splitting that story into three strands.

But while the second half of the film loses some of the tension of having Cecilia, Robbie and Briony in the same frame, it also contains some of the film’s most stunningly cinematic moments. A four-minute tracking shot that stumbles numbly around the bloody beach at Dunkirk is audacious and profoundly moving. The role of Briony is taken over by Romola Garai, now a nurse paying penance for the wrong she claims she is only beginning to understand. But it’s left to Vanessa Redgrave, in a coda showing Briony at the end of her career as a writer and her life, to convey the anguish of a lifetime of guilt. Awards season beckons.

15, 122mins

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