In 1946 a writer (Ralph Fiennes) accidentally encounters the husband (Stephen Rea) of a woman (Julianne Moore) whom he loved and tries to discover why she ended their affair 18 months before. Greene’s most confessional novel is a love story with a supernatural twist and ideal material for Neil Jordan, who has never shied away from miracles and whose films (like Mona Lisa and The Crying Game) often feature unaffiliated heroes unwittingly drawn towards an impossible love. The period is sharply evoked and the novel’s complex time-shifts masterfully negotiated, but what is most compelling is the way a conventional tale of adulterous passion begins to magnetise to itself other elements like spying, possessiveness, resurrection, religion and haunting: it could almost be Vertigo. Jordan never could understand what he called Greene’s ‘strange miasma’ about Hitchcock’s work (did Greene fear a kindred spirit?); and this masterful adaptation seems imbued with the spirit of both and the romantic agony at their heart.