Euan Tait Retreats Libretti

British genius: great acting and very moving ending, but not for the reason you expect from the long build up. What people don't say but whisper in anger and frustrated rage. Prisoners shouting to each other. The metaphors of pain are, however, only part of the life of this remarkable film, which draws its inner freedom from laughter. A gem: thanks to all involved.

It remains a film to return to: the emotions remain fresh with each watching, the failed 1950s housewife making her last effort to be successful in the assigned but impossible role (a chirpy, bird-like supporting role by Toni Collette shows how reality keeps breaking the role down, mirror in a later Woolf screen by the gentle parable of the tenderly regarded dead bird) with the incredible John O'Reilly as the atypical housewife's clueless but loving husband; Ed Harris as the dying poet, fragile and ferocious; the maternal Meryl Streep character, trying to entertain to ease her wounded being and make others happy at least. Subtle human portraiture; and Philip Glass' score carries the emotions along on its river.

Now this was the shock of the centre breaking apart. The film's first act concentrates on what appears to be a psychological, angry family drama, but all this disappears into the well-described terror of a nameless attack on a modern European society. It then draws back from the terror to return to the troubled characters and their relationships, unresolved in haunting music, light without a source, and the sheer beauty of rain falling - and the imnense threat. The mixture of joy, nameless terror and tenderness is brilliantly done, through simplicity of dramaturgic gesture, but also loveable characters.

Despite my dodgy French, such is the emotional power of the photography, characterisation and script, I was able to enter its inner world completely. One child wrecks another and is in turn wrecked - a juvenile culprit appears to have escaped but is trapped by the moment's wrong, having forever to live with his actions, poisoning the air and the moments he breathes. The uncertainty of the viewers' response to the character of Antoine is crucial: does one actually like or trust him, as adult as well as child - does he really care, and in answering that lies our response to the whole film. How many actually truly know what happened? We never know with absolute certainty, and that's another aspect of the greatness of this masterpiece. One more astonishment: the photography is absolutely beautiful, making yet another emotional connection with the film. Everything is under threat: the ambiguity of human innocence at any stage of a life, the slow collapse of the beauty around and therefore within us, as well as the more subtly portrayed existential crisis, seen in the (also symbolic) unnatural storm, and the now thin and barely recognisable winters. It will keep knocking on the door of my imagination, demanding to be seen, and seen more deeply.