Acclaimed British drama movie 45 Years has become available to stream for free.

The film, which stars Dune’s Charlotte Rampling and Quartet’s Tom Courtenay, focuses on a couple who are due to celebrate their wedding anniversary only to receive a letter that changes everything.

If you want to catch the film, it has now become available to stream for free via Channel 4 – though you’d better get in quick as it’s only available for 28 days.

Directed and written by Andrew Haigh, the 2015 movie is based on a short story called In Another Country by David Constantine.

45 Years sits at a near-perfect score of 97% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, with The Guardian calling it “a moving and absorbing drama featuring two performers offering a lifetime’s wisdom and technique in their performances”.

charlotte rampling, 45 years trailer

IFC Films

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The Toronto Sun suggested it is “a movie that will shatter you”, adding that it is “unhurried and essentially uneventful” but also “devastating”.

Movie Freak further called it “an instant classic” and “a drama of profound majesty sure to be marveled at for many years to come”, while Rolling Stone says the film “casts a hell of a spell”.

Haigh, who also directed 2011’s Weekend and worked on HBO series Looking, would go on to release acclaimed movie All of Us Strangers in 2023, and spoke to Digital Spy at the time about the thread that connects it to past projects such as 45 Years.

paul mescal, andrew scott, all of us strangers

Courtesy of Searchlight Picture

“I feel like as a queer person, time is somehow different,” he explained. “Your life seems to go on a different trajectory, and you don’t have the sort of markers that other people have, although that is changing. I do think for younger queer people, it is a slightly different experience.

“So I think it’s just inherent in me as a person that I see time slightly differently, which is why it’s always so interesting for me to play around with the idea of time.

“All of my films, whether it’s been Weekend, which is an obsession with 48 hours of someone’s life, or 45 Years where something from the past has come back and disrupted the present, it just… I’m just so interested in the nature of time.”

45 Years is streaming now on Channel 4.

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Sam is a freelance reporter and sub-editor who has a particular interest in movies, TV and music. After completing a journalism Masters at City University, London, Sam joined Digital Spy as a reporter, and has also freelanced for publications such as NME and Screen International.  Sam, who also has a degree in Film, can wax lyrical about everything from Lord of the Rings to Love Is Blind, and is equally in his element crossing every ‘t’ and dotting every ‘i’ as a sub-editor.