There is a lot – perhaps too much – going on in this handsome adaptation of Sarah Waters’ 2009 novel, a neo-Gothic noir that encompasses a haunted house, a broken family, the damage wrought by war and a diagnosis of class tensions in mid-century England. It has material enough for two or even three films, which makes the one we are watching feel somewhat overstuffed.

On the surface it is the story of Hundreds Hall, a Warwickshire manor house whose grandeur by the late 1940s has gone desperately to seed. Dr Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson) remembers it well, having visited the place as a boy when his mother was a servant there; flashbacks recall the occasion, an Empire Day fete, and the moment he broke off a plasterwork acorn as a memento.