Set in the town of Wetherby in West Yorkshire, the film centers on Jean Travers, Vanessa Redgrave, a middle-aged spinster schoolteacher. One evening, she invites married friends for a dinner party, only to have some terrible repressions and past traumas dredged up when guest John Morgan, Tim McInnerny, expresses his emotional pain. The strange young man arrives at Jean's cottage the next morning with a gift of pheasants. While waiting for tea, he puts the barrel of a gun in his mouth and kills himself.
From this point onward, the film’s story unfolds as chronologically discrete, interlocking flashbacks, presenting events from multiple viewpoints and layering the recent past with memories long gone. The central mystery of Morgan’s suicide sits at the fulcrum of the narrative, which behaves like a jigsaw puzzle and often seems to be missing crucial pieces, in keeping with Hare’s distinctive approach to exposition. The dinner party scenes braid together with police investigations into the tragedy, gradually revealing that Morgan was not an invited guest—he wandered in with others who assumed he was an acquaintance of Jean’s, while Jean herself assumed her friends had brought him along.
A volatile young woman, Karen Creasy, Suzanna Hamilton, enters Jean’s life after the funeral and insinuates herself into the household. Delivered from the funeral to Jean’s doorstep by Mike Langdon, Stuart Wilson, Karen remains remote, testy, and emotionally unavailable. For weeks she lingers, embittered and uninterested in Morgan’s death, yet her presence unsettles Jean. Flashbacks reveal that Morgan had become obsessed with Karen when they were students at the University of Essex, a desire Karen rejected outright, a rejection that may have contributed to his decision to move to Yorkshire and end his life. When Jean hints that Karen may bear some responsibility for Morgan’s actions, Karen flatly denies provoking anything, and she eventually leaves town, taunting Jean by suggesting she wonders what role the spinster might have played if the suicide was not an accident.
The narrative also travels back to Jean’s youth, with teenage Jean and her lifelong friend Marcia, Judi Dench as Marcia Pilborough, seen in 1953. Jean’s engagement to airman Jim Mortimer, Robert Hines, is shown as he departs for Southeast Asia. He is later revealed to have met a brutal end in a gambling den amid uprisings in British Malaya, a fate that echoingly frames Jean’s later life. These memories intersect with the present, gradually illuminating the dull resentment and lonely despair that can drive someone to despair, and offering insight into the restlessness of the younger generation as well.
As the past and present criss-cross, Jean begins to recognize the emotional weather of her era and the priorities that defined Thatcher-era Britain. She discusses these concerns with Stanley Pilborough, Ian Holm (her sister’s husband and the town solicitor), who tends to be inebriated and sardonic. The film also sketches the fragile, fractured marriages of middle-aged couples such as Roger Braithwaite and Verity Braithwaite, with Verity’s discontent echoing through the town. Even Mike Langdon confesses his own failed relationship with his mistress Chrissie, Penny Downie, who ultimately returns to her sheep-farming husband.
Alongside these threads run portraits of other local figures—Arthur, Christopher Fulford; Derek (Chrissie’s husband), Patrick Blackwell; and the landlady, Brenda Hall—who populate Jean’s world with quiet, everyday tensions. And amid the archival footage of a TV commentator, Alan Rickman, the film emphasizes how media, memory, and rumor entwine to shape perception of a single, devastating act.
By the end, Jean seems to have shifted from mourning a life she might have led to embracing the imperfect life she has now. The suicide, viewed from numerous angles, becomes less a crime of passion and more a revelation of what loneliness and unspoken regrets can do to a community over decades. Jean resolves to make the best of the present, even as the echoes of the past persist, reminding the audience that the road not taken often casts the longest shadow.
