After the revelation of the horrible secrets of the family, the Keyes, a well known and wealthy family that lives in England, who adopts a smart girl, Anne Keyes, who after revealing the horrible secrets of the family incidents come to inspire the Second World War.
Trapped in a perilous zone between TV and cinema, this wartime conspiracy thriller ploughs through an improbable plot with all the urgency of a snail going through wet concrete.
Despite a few convincing turns, the feature is disappointingly winded, eventually going off on a few needless tangents that derail the whole production.
A bizarrely tasteless pet-euthanasia subplot -- clumsy parallels with the Holocaust abound -- is merely the wackiest turn the wildly unconvincing script takes: it's well below Poliakoff's more intelligent TV work.
Stupendous turn from Romola Garai in the lead role but, while this sets up intrigue and atmosphere well, the plot devices creak audibly towards the end.
Unfortunately, Stephen Poliakoff's tale of wartime skulduggery should have stayed on paper. The sort you can flush. Tedious, overlong and laughably unconvincing, the only remarkable thing about it is Bill Nighy's performance. Specifically, how bad it is.
For all its sumptuous production design, Steven Poliakoff's tale of glamorous toffs and treason is so laboured and slow that it's practically pensionable.
