A tale of redemption and forgiveness in the face of hard-to-imagine brutality, The Railway Man is like the world's most profound new year's resolution corralled into movie form. And guess what? It's out on January 1, just in time to make us want to be a whole lot nicer to each other.
These new posters introduce the film's dramatis personae, including tortured (in every sense) prisoner of war Eric Lomax - both young (Jeremy Irvine) and middle-aged (Colin Firth) - and his Japanese tormentor Takashi Nagase (The Wolverine's Hiroyuki Sanada). Directed by Sydney-born Jonathan Teplitzky, The Railway Man is an Anglo-Aussie adapation that tackles the aftermath of the military disaster that befell the two Allied nations when Singapore surrender to the Japanese in 1942. Thousands of soldiers, including young signaller and railway buff Lomax (Jeremy Irvine), were marched into captivity to work on the notorious Burma railway amid barely conceivable privations.
Set partly after the fall of Singapore and partly in 1970s Berwick, it initially finds Lomax and his former comrades, including Stellan Skarsgård's Finlay, bearing the scars of their experiences. Forgiveness seems a long way off at this point.
Lomax recorded his experience in prose - his book is a novelshelf staple in many homes - but it was the efforts of his wife, Patricia (Nicole Kidman), to engineer a reconciliation with Nagase that frames the story.
The Railway Man is out in the UK on New Year's Day. You'll find the trailer here.