Critics reviews

Kate and Geoff come to appear as prisoners not only of their hidden past but of the sharply differing temperaments that first attracted them, and that now threaten to drive them apart. Haigh drizzles this growing abyss into our consciousness as it arrives in Kate's. In one of the many long shots he favors, we see Kate and Geoff through their window, talking in their garden. We can't hear what they're saying, but tension crackles between them like an electrical current.

A tour de force of subtlety and restraint.

Kate—played by Charlotte Rampling with a frightening level of emotional commitment—is wise in just the same respects in which [Anomalisa's] Lisa is naïve. Her responses are as unfixed as the other film's heroine's are pitifully predictable; her mind is as supple as Lisa's is limited. She is, in other words, a full-formed fictional creation, and her presence in the movie multiplies the possible paths down which it can go.

As a serious, sometimes severe woman who only gradually gains our sympathy, Rampling gives a remarkable performance. Her journey, which begins with a simple question, ("What does the letter say?") leads, irrevocably, to the dilemmas that plagued our greatest philosophers.

Kate's gaze will not be shaken from belated proof that their 45 years was a sham and even a desert. That is so resolutely external a vision that it exposes the limits of even good filmmaking. These two deserve better. They deserve the revealed inwardness of, say, Michael Haneke's Amour, a film that believed in marriage even to a point of departure.

45 Years, by the English writer-director Andrew Haigh, is an understated, low-key chamber piece with a devastating power. It gathers its force so lightly, so civilly that we almost don't realise that the thunder is about to strike and leave everyone gasping for breath.

Geoff told Kate about the tragedy decades earlier, and the dead lover has receded in their memories. But now the snow over the glacier crevasse where she was entombed has melted, revealing her perfectly preserved. Climate change is particularly appropriate as a plot device here: the receding glacier exposes not only the corpse but also nagging doubts and messy emotions, just in time for the Mercers' upcoming 45th wedding anniversary.

The talent and charisma of Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay aren't deployed but milked in the writer and director Andrew Haigh's portentous drama of a marriage in crisis... The airtight script is matched by sluggish direction that leaves Rampling and Courtenay with little to do but look earnest and troubled. Haigh makes his intentions so obvious—and makes his actors display them so blatantly—that all imagination is foreclosed.

45 Years takes a place in a world in which climate change has obligated that pattern of thought, and while it may not apply to the most mundane of decisions, it does not occur in a dystopic world, either. One day, Geoff woke up and found every decision he has ever made has caught up to him; it's scary to think that it might not be long until the collective human race can relate.

...This finale is what separates 45 Years from all contemporary standard issue film drama and places it on a level of cinematic expressiveness comparable to Bresson, Rohmer and Ozu. Those masters of understatement belong to a generation whose time one would have thought come and gone. But is in fact very much alive in Andrew Haigh.

As a Londoner who moved to North America a year and a half ago, it struck me as having some powerfully British qualities, above all a tremendous sense of understatement.

With 45 Years [Haigh] announces himself as a fully-fledged British auteur and chronicler of the intimate... The universality and truthfulness with which this is all depicted is so powerful that even if a Martian spaceship had landed in their vegetable patch, the consequences on the couple's marriage would still have ended up feeling entirely plausible.