Adapted by Booker Prize–winning author Ian McEwan from his own novel, this riveting drama stars two-time Academy Award winner Emma Thompson as a British High Court judge tasked with making a decision that could mean life or death for a young man.
Judge Fiona Maye (Thompson) is married to her work, which has become a problem for her husband, Jack (Stanley Tucci), who announces that he wants to have an affair. Treating the matter more as an annoyance than a life-altering crisis, Fiona kicks Jack out and focuses on her current case. The question: Should a couple who are Jehovah's Witnesses be permitted to deny a life-saving blood transfusion to their leukaemia-stricken 17-year-old son (Fionn Whitehead, Dunkirk 2017)? Fiona finds herself taking unusual measures to determine her verdict — measures that will have far-reaching consequences.
Directed by Richard Eyre (Notes on a Scandal 2006), The Children Act brims with intelligence and intrigue. Thompson is at her best as Fiona, finding herself sliding deeper into a mire of professional compromise and personal desperation, a cauldron of conflicted feelings bubbling beneath a veneer of composure.
Tuesday 23rd October
105 min
18+
Film Festival
