Well, I did watch it again with my wife this time. It is a film that bears watching again and I appreciated much more the good points of the film. However, I still stand by my comments about the ending.

The beginning scenes give you all the clues to the film in a really cinematic way. The ambiguous opening shot of the country mansion pulls back to reveal a doll’s house. Nothing is really as it seems. The scenes repeated from different points of view. The typewriter clack on the soundtrack morphing into the music. Very much literary references. And one of the things I missed but my wife picked up on quickly - the relationship between Robbie and Cecilia. Nothing is said in the narrative but again the clues are there. Robbie, the lowly cook’s son has been financed in his education by the now dead head of the household and his mother’s assertion that Robbie was “nothing like his father” suggest that there has been a liaison in the past between the master and the cook that produced Robbie. So maybe there is more of the forbidden love element than I originally thought with Robbie and Cecilia being related. Incestuous goings on amongst the gentry - that wouldn’t do!

One element of the film that my wife and I both agreed could have been improved was the sound quality. As most of the dialogue was fast and of the Noel Coward variety, clear sound was essential but we kept missing key lines in the film and having to ask each other what did they just say.

I watched the final half hour carefully again and still feel duped. The director Joe Wright may retort that you were warned during the first half of the film that things were not as they seem. So, why were you not sceptical about the latter scenes in the hospital and the scene at Cecilia’s flat? My response would be that there were no obvious clues in these scenes as there had been in previous scenes. Deliberately so to make the ending that much more unexpected. I was interpreting it as straight forward narrative and genre. A sneaky trick.

The final confessional by the dying Briony I understood better her arguments but I still say that it was a weak gesture that would mean nothing to anyone except her. Atonement, to me, means acknowledging your mistakes, your sins, and trying your best to put them right. Her tragedy was that she could not put them right for Robbie and Cecilia in real life. But she could have confessed to Robbie’s mother. She could have done the same to her mother (although we are told that the episode had been swept under the carpet). But she didn’t and what she did was far little too late and comes across as self serving only. She could have lived with her conscience after confessing better but might have had to endure the wrath or anger of real people still alive. Instead she retreats into a fictional world of “what might have been” for what seems to have been the rest of her life. Maybe that was her penance for her dreadful act. Penance - now that would have been a better title.