Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
There is just one week until Kate Mercer's 45th wedding anniversary and the planning for the party is going well. But then a letter arrives for her husband. The body of his first love has been discovered, frozen and preserved in the icy glaciers of the Swiss Alps. By the time the party is upon them, five days later, there may not be a marriage left to celebrate.
45 Years is a quietly devastating chamber drama built on two extraordinary central performances from Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay. The plot is deceptively simple but surgically precise — a single letter unraveling decades of marriage with slow, accumulating dread. Rampling in particular delivers one of the great subtle performances of the decade, conveying entire emotional landscapes with minimal expression. The cinematography is competent and appropriately restrained but not especially distinctive. The novelty is moderate — the 'long marriage destabilized by revelation' premise isn't new, but Haigh's compression of it into five days and his refusal of melodrama gives it a specific texture. The ending, however, is genuinely exceptional: the freeze on Rampling's face during the anniversary dance is one of the most quietly shattering final images in recent British cinema, earning its outlier score.