A story we have seen many times before - woman destroyed by love - but one with which the director of The House of Mirth both has a particular affinity and invests with that dreamlike, almost somnambulist, melancholy and clear-eyed, even-handed candour in his representations of the key players: desperate romantic wife, wronged but dignified husband, selfish but droll lover, stern yet empathetic landlady. As a result the familiar turns of the narrative matter less than the exquisitely observed pathos of their enaction. Davies messes with chronology, too, so that we begin at story's end and are never sure how close together the two suicide attempts come. The final shot is a chilling pan onto a burnt-out shell of a house, at once proleptic and symbolic of the protagonist's utter desolation, like something from a David Lynch movie.
Review of The Deep Blue Sea
