On Chesil Beach
(15) ★★★

IAN McEwan’s 2007 Booker Prize-nominated novella gets the big-screen treatment in this restrained and melancholic exploration of young love’s hidden anxieties.

Florence (Saoirse Ronan, sensational as ever) and Edward (one-to-watch Billy Howle) are a newly married couple in 1962 England who have travelled to an idyllic hotel near Chesil Beach in Dorset for their honeymoon.

But their relationship isn’t as rosy as it seems. Soon after arriving they find themselves unable to connect in the ways they had hoped, with feelings of intimate insecurities creeping into their relationship just as soon as it’s started.

Working from a script by McEwan himself, stage and TV turned feature film director Dominic Cooke tells the story with an old-fashioned stateliness that, ironically, feels refreshing in this day and age. He uses the proposed, ridiculously presumed hotel room consummation of the marriage as a kind of force which the repeated flashbacks revolve around.

From their first meeting of eyes across the room at Oxford to Florence’s introduction into Edward’s complex life as a caring helping hand for his mother Marjorie (a terrific Anne Marie Duff), who has brain damage, the narrative filling in of blanks makes clear that their relationship is one born out of passion and a deep sense of connection.

But they are crippled by a misunderstanding and inexplicably ingrained fear of sex, owing to the fact they come from households headed by a generation – particularly Florence’s prim and proper mother Violet (Emily Watson) – who wouldn’t dare broach the matter much less explain the mechanics of it.

But how important is sex to a marriage? Is intimacy a deal-breaker? It’s a quandary at the heart of a handsomely made period piece that is painted with a mood of melancholia and longing, one that is so importantly set in a very specific period of the past, the repressive mores of which seem quaintly dated.

The whole thing is informed by awkward silences hanging between even more awkward dialogue – sometimes what’s being said is stilted, cryptic and lacking in self-awareness to the point where it can take away from the heart-rending poetry of the story rather than adding to it.

The pressure cooker sense of anticipation found in the first half works a lot better than the more heavy-handed second half. It leans more and more into unintentionally hokey territory as it goes on, eventually skipping over a couple of eras like so many pebbles across a picturesque countryside pond.

However, although tied up in a way that feels too self-consciously neat for its own good, it’s driven by an affecting sense of sad tragedy which touches your heart and an engaging thematic curiosity that gets into your head.