Love, love, love. That’s what the first full feature from Liverpudlian film-maker Terence Davies in over ten years is about. Unrequited love; the kind that rips your heart out of your chest and shreds it before your eyes while you weepingly still plead true love. It’s a brutal affair and THE DEEP BLUE SEA portrays it in all its horror.

Based loosely on a Terence Rattigan play from 1952, the film begins with Hester (Rachel Weisz, almost luminous in her fragility) attempting suicide in a post-second world war boarding house. Memories come back of how she came to be here: of how she left her wealthy but dull husband William Collyer (a rare cinema appearance from Simon Russell Beale) for the younger, rakish Freddie – an ex-fighter pilot, heavy drinker and damaged man pretty much still living the war.

As a film, it could so easily step into melodrama, but Davies never allows it to do so. Much of the first half unfolds in a style similar to his masterpiece, THE LONG DAY CLOSES, as a series of impressionistic memories which hang in the air like cigarette smoke caught in the light. As with that film, Davies recreates the period 1950s setting with impeccable detail. A chilly, austere country of gas fires and reproving landladies, where suicide is illegal and leaving your husband leads to damnation.

If there is one criticism that could be levelled at THE DEEP BLUE SEA, it is that Hester’s happiness with Freddie is glimpsed only fleetingly before her situation plunges into desperate need and longing. But this is a slight niggle. Tom Hiddleston superbly plays Freddie as a burned-out firebrand and the final 20 minutes are almost agonising to watch, as indeed they should be. This is a film full of emotion and made for grown-ups who require a bit more depth to their cinema than adolescent vampires and shape-changing robots can supply.