That material is Rachel Joyce’s eponymous best-selling 2012 novel about a retired man living in Devon with his wife Maureen (Penelope Wilton) who receives word that an old friend, Queenie (Linda Bassett), is dying in a hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed. He has the intelligence to pull against the material, secure in the knowledge that love, grief and an inability to forgive oneself are embedded in the material and will seep out in tiny, heartrending doses.

Broadbent, however, opts for unsentimental expressive choices, and so tethers swollen motives to the ground. Harold Fry is a character whose emotional broadness would, in the wrong hands, make him a cartoon character, pumping his hammy fists at the heavens. We only know that he will do it with integrity. Unlike movie stars whose personas remain consistent across every picture they illuminate, Broadbent is an enigma. Now 73, Jim Broadbent has traded for decades in a subtle mode of acting that means he disappears into characters. An elderly man begins a remarkable journey after discovering that a former colleague has terminal cancer in Hettie Macdonald's adaptation of Rachel Joyce's best-selling novel.

The unexpected pilgrimage of harold fry