45 years is a strange wedding anniversary to celebrate with a full-scale party. Kate Mercer is quick to explain: the party for their 40th was cancelled at short notice, you see, when her husband Geoff underwent bypass surgery.
The couple have a week to go before the much-postponed occasion: theoretically a week of planning, dress purchasing, a bit of social fretting. Instead, it becomes the week when a cold, stony nugget of realisation sinks to the bottom of their marriage and stays there. It’s spurred by a letter to Geoff from the Swiss authorities, explaining that the perfectly-preserved body of his ex-girlfriend, Katya, has been found 50 years after she slipped into an Alpine crevasse. From the moment the news is received Kate can “smell Katya's perfume in the room” and her perspective on their marriage changes forever.
Haigh’s script for his previous work, Weekend, did that trickiest of things and made pillow talk believable. Here, he’s adapted a short story by David Constantine – a tiny, suggestive shard of a thing – and fleshed it out, adding the anniversary context, some minor characters, and a much more expansive ending. It could have become stagey, or overly verbose, a feast of recriminations to rival late Ingmar Bergman. Instead, it’s pointedly still, and sculpted to make the conversations mere starting points. All the real clues are in the acting, the pauses between lines, and what the camera’s doing to register the damage done.
The story is about whether secrets can be survived, whether the knowing or not knowing is more injurious. Haigh’s very fine, classically modulated film keeps these questions alive until literally its last shot, and lets them jangle their way through you for days afterwards.
