Perry Kate Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

VeteranLight I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Kaydan Christian A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

robert-temple-1 This is another superb film directed by Tim Fywell, based on a novel by Sarah Waters and with a script by the noted Andrew Davies. The film is dominated by a superb central performance by the young actress Anna Madeley. It is an eerie tale set in Victorian London, and the directing and art direction are a bit high Gothic intentionally, to heighten the sense of the supernatural. For me, the high point was a personal one, for it featured one of the last film performances of my old friend Domini Blythe, who died not long afterwards of cancer. The first time I met Domini, John Hurt and I were in the Flask pub across from his little house in Flask Walk in Hampstead. It was a hot day and we needed cold beers. Then an amazingly beautiful girl entered the pub, in search of a cold beer for herself. John and I agreed that she was so beautiful that we must try and pick her up, if only to find out who she was. We got her name out of her, but John was otherwise getting nowhere and so I decided to try a chat line of asking her if she were related to Blythe the stage hypnotist, and said I was fascinated by his technique of being able to exercise mind control by speaking through a loudspeaker attached to a large balloon which he floated above crowds of people outdoors. When Domini realized I knew of and appreciated her grandfather (her father was Peter Blythe the actor), she instantly made me a blood-brother, and she fastened her magnetic eyes on me and began speaking to me in her low, sultry, mesmerising tones so that I was quickly entranced. Later, her favourite thing to do with me was to 'become a python'. She would make me stand in the middle of a room, preferably with an audience of friends, and she would slither over my shoulder, down my back, under my arms, under my legs, and eventually come to rest on my shoulders, hanging her down down in front of my chest and look up at me with a penetrating hypnotic gaze. During all of this performance she never once touched the ground, and appeared to defy gravity. She later became part of the original cast of the hit show OH, CALCUTTA!, which was written by the weird Ken Tynan, who was married to Claire Bloom. That was back in the days when we were all young together. She went on a long Shakespeare tour of Canada and didn't come back, so we were out of touch for many years. In the last months of her life, as she was desperately ill, my wife and I exchanged loving emails with her, having by chance discovered how to contact her. Her brother told us how much it meant to her that her old friends had not forgotten her, and it gave her some comfort in her last days. Another actress in this film who was also near the end of her life and would die of cancer at practically the same time as Domini is Anna Massey. I did not know her nearly as well as I could have wished, but she was one of the most fascinating women in London. If you wanted real conversation, then going to her house and talking to her and her scientist husband Uri could not be bettered. I shall never forget the moment when she handed me a dull grey rock and told me that it was from South Africa and was called kimberlite. She kept it on inconspicuous display in her sitting room at the front of the house. She told me to look at it more closely. I saw that it contained a raw diamond. Apparently, that is how they occur in Nature. Probably it was the only such specimen in London apart from the Natural History Museum's mineral collection. And now they are gone, such amazing and irreplaceable souls. Anna Madeley, however, remains, now has 41 credits, and was even in A FANTASTIC FEAR OF EVERYTHING (2012, see my review), part of which was shot in my office. The other young female lead in the film is Zoe Tapper, whose treacherous allure is enough to lead many astray, which is what happens to poor Anna Madeley. For this film is about spirits, séances, lies, treachery, crime, redemption, and girls liking girls. And there are lots of jangling prison keys and cell doors and female wardens. So it is quite a heady offering. And watch out for Peter Quick! Oh yes, there is the comforting and soothing presence of Anne Reid as Mrs. Brink in the film, who seems prepared to reach out of the screen and wipe any anxious brow.

Cain Aldred I decided to stay up and watch Affinity due to being " a gripping dramatisation" and "full of feints and foreboding" as promised by this weeks RadioTimes Magazine....I can say without hesitation that I was not disappointed.The story was powerful and full of human emotion. I felt that Zoe Tapper who plays the women's prison inmate/spiritualist Selina Dawes and Anna Madeley as upper-class lady Magaret who together form a bond of strange depths are absolutely fantastic as their characters. Full of emotion, foreboding and uncertainty until the very end. Nothing can prepare you for the final twist.I have never read the book unlike the previous reviewer and to be honest I am not sure I am going to now because I would not want it to change the impression I was left with following the film....so powerful I dreamt of it the same night.Watch it or you really are missing out.Richard

chflindt Affinity was the television low point of Christmas 2008. It seemed to have been thrown together at the last minute, with jarring editing, terrible sound balances, and a script that seemed to have been put together by a cliché-filled computer. Everything seemed wrong - the men's facial hair, the extras' wooden street-walking, the dreadful music, the sheer repetitiveness (we turned it into a drinking game: one finger for 'walks nervously through prison gates', two fingers for 'walks nervously into cell'; we all got very drunk.) I loathe wobbly-cam shots, trying to watch characters as they bounce around the screen in a haphazard fashion, but occasionally, it can be bearable - Bourne, for instance. 'Affinity' was not the place for wobbly-cams, especially when they are mixed - seemingly at random - with steady shots. I hate to ask it, because he is supposed to have TV's Midas Touch, but is Andrew Davies entering 'Emperor's New Clothes' territory?

hudiefanny No doubt this is definitely not the best movie adopted from Sarah Waters' works, as far as I'm concerned. However, it's also not at the bottom of the list. I kind of like this dramatic plot but strongly detest the false ending.Similar to Fingersmith, Affinity is a story of skin game. A woman plans to acquire her own freedom or even happy life on the sacrifice of another miserable woman. The swindler commits her scheme successfully through all the lies and deceptions. But there's no winner in Sarah Waters' stories. Huge price is paid. The conspiracy costs too much, purity, clear conscience, and maybe more.The victim of Affinity, Margaret, was at the tragic focus. Living in a traditional society and a high-brow community, she found herself homosexual. Her secret lesbian lover, Helen, betrayed her and it made things even worse that Helen married her brother and made herself Margaret's sister-in-all. The only consolation left to Margaret was a strand of hair in her necklace lock. She kept all her secrets there and in her diary. Six months after her father's death, she was offered a job in Milbank Jail as a lady-visitor. There, she ran into her destiny, Celina.Celina was sentenced to a four-year imprisonment. But the movie generously provides scenes to support her claim of innocence. Margaret devoted her curiosity, compassion, and finally her affection to this so-called affinity, which turns out to be beguilement in disguise.Celina fled away with her real partner Vigers in a ship while Margaret committed suicide by drowning herself in the river. The ending would be prefect if it just stopped here or at most with Celina's inexplicable tear drops. The illusionary intimacy in water and Celina unquenchable grief which aroused Vigers' strong reproof "Remember whose girl you are" are really too much.Is the affinity between them real or just a lie? I would like to make it unknown if I were the film director, because it is unknown. Who could tell for sure that Margaret killed herself out of nothing else but losing her one love of lifetime? She was desperate, when she was cheated for the second time, when she was given the last straw and taken away immediately after, when she lost everything she had, her money, her wooer, her hope for a brand new life. I cannot deny that she had a crush on Celina, but was it true love without any impurity? And as to the adorable puppet and great performer, Celina, who knows who her real affinity was? They were far away from affinity, not even close.I haven't read this original novel yet so that I don't know whose idea it is to fake or at least exaggerate their love in the end. Sarah Waters, probably. She's too merciful. Maybe that's true that she worked out Fingersmith years later to compensate the sadness of this tragedy. It's a much better work.Most of Sarah Waters' protagonists are lesbians. But I think she's intended to tell more than homoerotism. She writes about people. Women, especially the homosexual ones, are the most sensitive and sophisticated group of all. Sarah Waters makes her novels a stage, to reveal their, or to be more accurately, our life, love, desire, solitude, and the darkness in the deepest of our hearts. Lesbians are the representatives rather than all her subjects.As one of the woman audience, I've seen myself mirrored in her work, more or less. And I've been seeking for the solution of life from her masterpieces. Have I found the answer? No, I haven't. I don't know if I can or if anyone else can. I even cannot tell for sure whether there's something like that in her creations or in this world. But one thing is certain that Sarah Waters tells us through her stories: Affinity may not find us some way out. But deception absolutely leads to destruction and corruption.