The Painted Veil (12A)

These two movies, a world apart in terms of period, class and continent, present different perspectives on Englishness. What unites them, in a curious way, is their exploration of a state of mind. The spoilt socialite of The Painted Veil may seem to have little in common with the pintsized skinhead of This Is England, but both are trying to cope with loneliness, and both attach themselves to company they later discover to be, in a word, wrong.

The Painted Veil, based on Somerset Maugham's novel about marital misadventure, initially trades in the brittle English politesse that came to be a byword for Merchant-Ivory films: there's more cream linen and muslin here than you can shake a malacca stick at. When, in 1920s London, the stiff-necked bacteriologist Walter Fane (Edward Norton) proposes marriage to the bored society girl Kitty (Naomi Watts), she accepts him almost out of irritation. "I think I improve greatly on acquaintance," Walter tells her, a remark that they will both come to rue after they relocate to Shanghai, and Kitty falls for a handsome vice consul (Liev Schreiber).

Walter discovers her infidelity, and decides on an exquisitely horrible revenge. He accepts a job in a remote mountain village in China where cholera has ravaged the population and, what's more, national unrest threatens the colonials. It's not quite the place to take your English rose, and Kitty soon realises the peril he has exposed them to. On arriving at their new home he points out the bed where the previous occupant expired: "That can be your room," he tells her. Maugham's cruelty of tone looks ahead to Graham Greene, who would have enjoyed this flyblown outpost on "the dangerous edge of things", and Greene may well have been inspired by the figure of the British deputy commissioner (Toby Jones) who anaesthetises himself with opium, whisky and exotic young flesh.

John Curran, who directed Watts in another tale of marital torture, We Don't Live Here Anymore (2004), controls the redemptive spirit of Maugham's book with merciful restraint, and gets excellent performances all round. Watts, in a role Garbo played in 1934, offers a touchingly bruised humanity as a woman punished beyond reason for her sins. Norton, suppressing the swagger, lends vivacity and humility to the cuckolded doctor. Better yet are Jones, like Peter Lorre in his pug-faced naughtiness, and Diana Rigg, as a worldly-wise mother superior, slyly inverting her sexpot past - not with a bang but with a wimple.

Some will baulk at the slow pace and intensity of the playing but, for me, these were precisely the qualities that made this work: amping it up might have tipped it into melodrama. It sneaked up on me, and I was moved.