REVIEW: Rachel Weisz Shines Through the Contemplative Dankness of The Deep Blue Sea

There are so few filmmakers willing to tackle the romantic melodrama these days that Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea is welcome just for its sheer novelty. An adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play, the picture opens with an attempted suicide and ends with an uneasy kind of redemption. It’s a love story with a great deal of furious, elegant handwriting packed between the lines, an exploration of immutable class distinctions and emotional and sexual repression in postwar England. And Rachel Weisz, as a woman who risks everything for the love of the wrong man, carries the mood and subtext of the material safely tucked in her dressing-gown pocket – she’s vulnerable and self-motivated in all the right measures.
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