Craiglockhart Hospital, Edinburgh, 1917. Officer and poet Siegfried Sassoon (James Wilby) is delivered to psychiatrist William Rivers (Jonathan Pryce) after writing a letter condemning the Great War. Already there are Billy Prior (Jonny Lee Miller), struck mute in the trenches of France, and the traumatised Wilfred Owen (Stuart Bunce). Gradually Rivers brings Billy to recall the horrors that put him here, while Sassoon befriends fledging poet Owen.

From Pat Barker's novel, Giles MacKinnon's follow-up to Small Faces makes gruelling viewing. It unfolds in the hospitals charged, with doomed inevitability, with restoring the participants, only to send them back to the Front.

Arguably, dropping both Sassoon and Owen into this mix - discussing their poetry - is over-egging the pudding, but then this is really a film less about patients than doctors. Pryce is superb as Rivers, a man accumulating suffering like a dog accumulates fleas, acquiring a stutter (officers stutter, lower ranks go mute, he tells Prior) and developing, as a fellow medic diagnoses, a kind of shellshock by proxy. He performs, he's told, "gentle miracles" unlike the barbaric electrical treatments - almost tortures - practised elsewhere by Doctor Yelland (John Neville).

MacKinnon's approach to the material is conservative, but reins back on over-prettifying the poetry by keeping flashbacks to a minimum. Battle scenes are bathed in so much grey mud that they become monochrome by default, and, in one of its best visual conceits, the film uses a nightmare vision of a canal tunnel to prefigure Owen's death, thus underlining the ultimate futility in Rivers' own compassion and suffering. An intelligent and unsparing film.