This story tells about that girl named Vera Brittan, an independent young woman who has a completely different experience. That girl decided one day to give up Oxford studies to become a war nurse. During that difficult period during World War I, she learned 'a love story of a young man, the infertility of war, and how to understand those very difficult times.
As this is a film about a witness bearer, it does well to capitalize on Vikander's perpetually observant eyes, which convey tenderness, intelligence, shock, incomprehension, comprehension, resiliency, and finally wisdom.
Though the movie at times feels oddly unfinished (you wonder what Miranda Richardson, in a tiny role as an Oxford professor, is there for), it's artful and moving.
The actors are all extremely fine, with special credit extending not just to Vikander but to Colin Morgan in wonderfully open-hearted form as a fellow member of an all-but-lost generation.
In what is a well-acted but fairly typical prestige period drama, it's Vikander's nuanced performance as the resolute but still-vulnerable Vera who gives the film its depth.
Somehow, Vikander sells it all, not with braying and big gestures, but with vulnerability, sincerity and the sort of ethereal realness that can't be quantified. More, please, more.
