45 Years, the “powerful” and “utterly devastating” British drama starring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, is leaving a UK streamer in a few days.
Starring Rampling and Courtenay as married couple Kate and Geoff Mercer, the film follows the pair as they prepare to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary.
As the important date approaches, Kate learns the crushing news that her husband used to be engaged to someone else.
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The logline reads: “A married couple preparing to celebrate their wedding anniversary receives shattering news that promises to forever change the course of their lives.”
Released in 2015, 45 Years will be leaving Channel 4’s streaming service in the very near future, with the drama set to be removed from the streamer on Thursday 4 September.
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Written and directed by Andrew Haigh, the film has a near-perfect score of 97% on Rotten Tomatoes from 209 reviews, with IndieWire describing it as “powerful”.
Their review called 45 Years a “quietly moving and deceptively tragic look at aging romance haunted by past mysteries”.
“Both actors deliver a master class in expression by understatement. The most unsettling of ghosts, we are moved to realise, are the ones we try hardest to deny,” penned The Toronto Star.
The Washington Post said: “Haigh knows how to thread a story in a way that makes it feel deliberate and spontaneous, so that when it reaches its climax, viewers feel that it’s both inevitable and utterly devastating.”
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“At some point in her 50-year career, Rampling became one of the world’s great actresses,” wrote The New York Post. “Driven by her and Courtenay’s work, and by director Andrew Haigh’s limpid style, the film is devastating.”
Meanwhile, one of the few less favourable reviews came from The New Yorker, who had this to say: “Haigh makes his intentions so obvious-and makes his actors display them so blatantly-that all imagination is foreclosed.”
45 Years is available to stream on Channel 4 until Thursday 4 September.
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Harriet is a freelance news writer specialising in TV and movies at Digital Spy.Â
A horror enthusiast, she joined Digital Spy after working on her own horror website, reviewing films and focusing largely on feminism in the genre.Â
In her spare time, Harriet paints and produces mixed-media art. She graduated from the University of Kingston with a BA in fine art, where she specialised in painting. She also has an MA in journalism from Birkbeck University.