“I really mean it. It’s not just a line. I really think you’re the most attractive girl I’ve ever met.” As soon as Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston) utters those words, we know the woman he utters them to is doomed. Actually, we already knew that: “The Deep Blue Sea” begins as Hester Collyer writes a letter, gathers some coins and uses them to flood her small London flat with gas. Why would a woman as beautiful as Rachel Weisz, who plays Hester, want to kill herself? As her day progresses, flashbacks tell us the story of her content but passionless marriage to judge Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale) and her affair with a handsome but slightly unstable Royal Air Force pilot.
Freddie was something of a war hero, the way he tells it, and his mind still seems to live in those dangerous, exhilarating days, though it’s been about five years since the war ended. He’s attractive, but it’s sometimes difficult to see why Hester gives up her comfortable life for him. “We doing something important for dear old Blighty,” Freddie says, in a line that would have most other women rolling their eyes.
