To Tom’s dismay, Marion has taken a local resident into their home to be cared for by her as part of a volunteer outreach programme: cantankerous stroke survivor Patrick, played by Rupert Everett.īut Patrick is no stranger: 40 years previously, he was the elegant museum curator and gay man (in an age when homosexuality was a criminal offence) who fell passionately in love with Tom and began a secret relationship with him, just as poor, shy, muddled Tom was courting Marion, hardly understanding anything about his own sexuality and certainly nothing about Marion’s, whose motives for taking him in now are fraught with guilt.

Linus Roache and Gina McKee play ageing married couple Tom and Marion, respectively a former police offer and retired schoolteacher. Screenwriter Ron Nyswaner has adapted the novel by Bethan Roberts, itself inspired by the famous ménage between novelist EM Forster, Forster’s policeman lover Bob Buckingham and Bob’s wife, May. But in its contrived way, it conjures a very English sort of shame. As an earnestly intended drama I can imagine it being performed on stage at a weekday matinee, the climactic speeches echoing wanly around the auditorium. It is set on a gloomy English seafront and intercuts between the buttoned-up 1950s and the late 1990s.

Michael Grandage’s new film has been coolly received by some, but I found it an interestingly fragile and Rattiganesque melodrama of repression and regret.

My policeman by bethan roberts