That’s Davies’ point, I think, in beginning with that daringly operatic opening montage: The Deep Blue Sea is, in part at least, about the humiliating gulf that often separates our love objects and our estimation of our love objects. (I’m thinking of the serene brain-tumor victim she played in 2006’s The Fountain, the noble Egyptian mathematician from last year’s Agora, or the plucky geneticist in the The Bourne Legacy.)

She acquits herself impeccably in every role, but in the past there’s been a sort of crisp ti diness to Weisz’s performances, or perhaps just the characters she chooses to play, who are often admirable, meaning that we never have to struggle to like them. Weisz is an actress who, despite her extraordinary beauty (seriously, is there a bad camera angle on Rachel Weisz?), has never held the screen for me.

Or maybe I let The Deep Blue Sea slide by because the prospect of a romantic period drama starring Rachel Weisz as a tormented adulteress just sounded dull. I think I skipped The Deep Blue Sea at the time because Davies’ last literary adaptation, The House of Mirth (2000), had struck me as airless and vague, with Gillian Anderson, the stolid skeptic of The X-Files, fatally miscast as the doomed social butterfly Lily Bart. The answer of course is simple: As a critic, movies are always coming at you thick and fast, and you have to make choices about what’s worth seeing and writing about. How did I miss The Deep Blue Sea, Terence Davies’ meditative, dreamlike adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1955 play about unrequited love in postwar London, back when it came out last spring?

In the deep movie ending