What's love got to do with it?

It isn't easy to adapt a book by Ian McEwan, since there is as much between the lines as in them. But screenwriter Joe Penhall and director Roger Michell have filleted down Enduring Love into a film which gets stronger and stronger as it progresses.

To put it at its simplest, the film boils down to a treatise on stalking as Joe Rose (Daniel Craig) grapples with the attentions of Jed (Rhys Ifans), the young man he meets after a tragic ballooning accident in which he feels guiltily complicit.

Joe, a university professor, has just reunited with his girlfriend (Samantha Morton) and is totally unprepared for the unprepossessing Jed's attentions. Slowly but surely, however, the sheer persistence of the man works into his sub-conscious. It wrecks his relationship with his girl and it bids fair to ruin his life.

You could call the film a psychological thriller, but it intends to be rather more than that. It shows how one man can metaphorically destroy another until there is nothing left but some desperate leap for freedom.

Logically, one might well ask why the police weren't summoned. But this is not a wholly realist film. Michell is concerned with the dark night of the soul rather than the working out of a mystery, and here Craig serves him very well indeed. So does Rhys Ifans as the obsessed and dangerously vulnerable stalker.

If the film has a fault it is that the relationship between the teacher and his lover never seems as real as the fraught liaison between Joe and Jed. Even so it is a frightening portrait of what can happen when a total stranger claims enduring love for someone to whom he or she means nothing.

Enduring Love
Cert: N/A