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It's hard to imagine a filmmaker who has less in common with playwright Terence Rattigan than Terence Davies, whose visually lush and aurally rapturous studies of working-class British life are far removed from those crisp, clench-jawed dramas and comedies of the 1950s.

Yet there's a heartbreakingly melancholic quality to The Deep Blue Sea, arguably Rattigan's finest work, that we see in films such as Distant Voices, Still Lives and the Long Day Closes, which is undoubtedly what attracted Davies to adapting his first stage work for the big screen.

Not surprisingly, the famously single-minded Davies has not bowed down to the conventions of the well-made play. Rather, he's wrenched Rattigan's tale of love and desire in the face of social convention into his own aesthetic universe, rearranging the narrative, cutting pages of dialogue and imposing his signature dreamy, expressionistic style.

Lovers of traditional British theatre will find The Deep Blue Sea challenging. However, those alive to the expressive power of pure cinema, in which a beam of light falling on a bit of grubby wallpaper or voices raised in a pub singalong has as much meaning as a bit of perfectly enunciated dialogue, will be swept up by Davies' version of Rattigan's play.

Davies sticks to the broad outlines of the original, which opens with the wife of an eminent judge, Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz) attempting to take her own life using sleeping pills and a coin-operated gas meter in her run-down London apartment.

However, Davies tumbles back over the previous months, telling the story of how Hester fell head over heels in love with rakish former RAF-pilot Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston), who, after the initial rush of their illicit coupling has cooled, now spends his time drinking and playing golf.

Davies also gives us a glimpse of Hester's dull and constrictive marriage to the older Sir William Collyer (a rare big-screen appearance for stage legend Simon Russell Beale), culminating in an excruciatingly funny dinner with the judge's domineering mother (Barbara Jefford).

It's not surprising that the vivacious, intelligent Hester rushed into the arms of Battle of Britain hero Freddie. While William represents crushingly repressive class-conscious old Blighty, his wife is rushing headlong toward the sexual revolution to come and Freddie is a new kind of Englishman.

But Freddie does not love Hester as deeply as Hester loves Freddie and this is her problem. She's in a long line of movie heroines for whom love and desire are everything and who is willing to sacrifice the comforts of a middle-class marriage for the thrill of unfettered passion - that is, until the perfume of lust is replaced by the stench of real life.

While Davies has lost much of Rattigan's famously brittle dialogue, his recreation of postwar Britain, with its air of exhaustion and deprivation, takes us deep into the soul of Hester, whose education and classiness have led her to expect so much more.

Read more:
Movie Review: The Deep Blue Sea