The subtly beautiful Alicia Vikander gives a mesmerising performance here as a woman stricken by the WWI deaths of her menfolk. The trouble is that there's nowhere for it to go, except for her to realise that War is Bad - which is handled ham-fistedly as a street-corner debate with some Jingos. I can't help feeling it's a little self-indulgent to single out a story like this. So many women were bereaved, so many men were killed - and who's to say which had the worst of it? - and they didn't all get to make the privileged choices about it that Vera Brittain and her coterie did. And is there also something self-indulgent about our Remembrance fixation, which seems to get stronger as the events recede in time - and yet which somehow leaves a group of Millenials like The Apprentice candidates unable to say what year WWII started?
Review of Testament of Youth
