It's tempting to dismiss this as watered-down McEwan, or hyper-produced Masterpiece Theatre, but every moment in this meditation on the dangers and shortcomings of fiction are carefully considered and finely crafted. And perhaps this is the sole flaw in an otherwise superlative adaptation. Wright carefully attempts to correlate the rigidity of the framing, the expansive mobile camera (the five-minute long take of the beach at Dunkirk), and the percussive choreography of motion, rhythm and light (the close-up of the adolescent Briony on the subway, plunging in and out of darkness) to the protagonist's florid imagination. But our retrospective consideration of the narrration as Briony's fictive construction renders the drama somewhat lifeless and inert. While this final revelation should wound, it settles for dejection. A considerable compromise, but an otherwise extraordinarily beautiful film.
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