| Overview: | Gillies MacKinnon's highly praised adaptation of Pat Barker's novel is a moving and powerful study of war and its devastating effects.
Set in a military hospital during World War I, the film tells of a real life encounter between army psychologist Dr. William Rivers (Jonathan Pryce) and the poet Siegfried Sassoon (James Wilby), who has been institutionalized in an attempt to undermine his public disapproval of the war.
It also concerns the young poet Wilfred Owen (Stuart Bunce) who, with support from Sassoon begins to write his great war poems. Rivers, whose duty it is to return shell-shocked officers back to the trenches, is tormented by the morality of what is being done in the name of medicine, especially the treatment of working-class officer Billy Prior (Jonny Lee Miller) who has been stricken dumb by the carnage he has witnessed.
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