75
Its director's romantic sensibilities wed to Terrence Rattigan's 60-year-old play, this period drama is buoyed by Rachel Weisz's poignant embodiment of a bourgeois wife seeking erotic autonomy.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
This isn't traditional heritage cinema and it may not tickle the same taste buds that devoured "Tinker Tailor" or "The King's Speech." It does, however, represent the unique vision of an artist who needs to be met halfway, and in an age of hubbub, its patient elegance is a rare thing we should nurture.
80
Sex is the subtext of everything that happens, yet this may be one of the least erotic movies ever made. It's stern and noble, very much in the Rattigan spirit. [26 March 2012, p.108]
80
It's the stuff of melodrama, heightened by Davies's pitch-perfect use of pop songs, like a sad "You Belong to Me," slurred by a misty crowd in a bar.
80
Davies is in fine form here, with luminous performances, especially from Rachel Weisz, rounding out a classy package whose only major problem is it may be a bit too true to its period sensibility and legit origins.
100
Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum
In this typically exquisite, nuanced, memory-infused work from master British filmmaker Terence Davies, we believe every minute of the torment of Hester (Rachel Weisz).
80
Village Voice by Nick Pinkerton
Plumbing disquieting depth, Deep Blue Sea investigates the insoluble dilemma of romantic love: the expectation, contrary to experience, that we can or will find every quality that we want in a single person.
80
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
Rachel Weisz performs with enormous intelligence and restraint.
75
It is quirky, dark, much maligned by feminists and too slow for some tastes, but it's a work worth seeing again, and Ms. Weisz is wonderful in it.
70
The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy
As intensely personal and deeply felt as it is, however, Davies' attempt to breathe new life into Rattigan's 1952 play is a rather bloodless, suffocating thing, lent tragic passion more by its use of Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto than by anything achieved by his star Rachel Weisz and her leading man.