Heartbreak in all of its wailing messiness is captured yet never felt in Terence Davies suitably titled The Deep Blue Sea.

Opening with the howling sounds of a violin playing soundtrack to an attempted suicide, The Deep Blue Sea is more than likely to have its viewers deter from love instead of embrace it.

Based on the play by Terrence Rattigan, the film focuses on Hester (Rachel Weisz) a married woman who leaves her older high court judge husband (Simon Russell Beale) for a young WWII veteran (Tom Hiddleston). It is her attempted suicide that opens the film, so wallowed is she is guilt and heartache that death seems the only way out.

In period, look and feel this is a film that suits Davies’ sensibilities. As his biographical documentary Of Time and the City showed he likes to point out the “inequalities” of past society, in this case the social stigma of divorce with Hester becoming a marked woman for her infidelity.

It makes sense then that Weisz was chosen to play Hester. In a career filled with portraying independent (aka shit stirring) women, Weisz no doubt felt for Hester’s plight. (If freely leaving a marriage of comfort yet void of passion for an affair fuelled by lust could be described as such).

It’s not only the social politics that makes Weisz such a good match. In look and emotion, Weisz makes her Hester a thing of fragile beauty, with her classic movie era looks (beautifully illuminated in cinematographer Florian Hoffmesiter’s soft lighting) and well spring of emotion (is there anyone better who can bring on the tears?) compiling to make this one of Weisz’s better performances.

So why does The Deep Blue Sea feel like it’s treading water? The answer to that is found in its lack of tangible emotion.

Sure, Weisz and Tom Hiddleston (who continues to prove his range with every performance) are solid. And sure there is plenty of crying, screaming, and passionate embraces. Yet for all of its theatrics, The Deep Blue Sea becomes a flat portrait of love and the depressing depths of heartbreak.

Davies needed to do more than stage scenes of sing-along’s in pubs and Weisz crying uncontrollably to bring the sympathy needed for this tale of love to make it work.

After all, how can a heart break when it wasn’t in love in the first place?