This gorgeous rediscovery is a companion to Brief Encounter as much for its blazing contrasts as for its echoes. Once again, a woman's voice carries us step-by-step through a tale of thwarted love between herself (this time Ann Todd, Lean's third wife) and Trevor Howard, now a biologist. Once again, marriage is defined as a relationship of “understanding and a very deep affection” (single beds, the better to weep in). Once again, train tracks bring on dire epiphanies. But from the lean Brief Encounter Lean has moved into full-fledged psychologically charged noir-melodrama replete with Claude Rains as the cuckolded husband. At a Swiss lake, at the Hotel Splendide, Mary and Steven, lovers in their youth, then more illicitly later on, meet yet again. It's based on H. G. Wells, but there is something Val Lewtonish about the film's complex flashback structure as well as its eerily beautiful “holiday” setting evoking something like tropical Switzerland; when the lovers ascend into the clouded Alps, we move inexorably into Guy Maddin territory.