On a sweltering English summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony misreads a moment of desire between her older sister Cecilia and Robbie, the housekeeper's son, and tells a lie that shatters three lives. The consequences ripple across years and the battlefields of the Second World War, as guilt and the impossibility of atonement haunt everyone involved. Joe Wright adapts Ian McEwan's novel into a sumptuous, aching tragedy, from its clacking typewriter score to a breathtaking single-take sweep across the beach at Dunkirk. Ravishing and devastating, it meditates on storytelling itself as both crime and redemption.