1920s London and Kitty (Naomi Watts) is nearing an age where she will be deemed "unmarriagable". Desperate to escape her stifling family home, she hastily marries dull bacteriologist Walter (Edward Norton), who just as hastily whisks her off to Shanghai. There, Kitty has an affair with a married man (Liev Schrieber) and when Walter finds out he punishes his wife by taking her with him into the middle of a cholera epidemic in rural China. What begins as a battle of wills between the mutually resentful couple turns into a love story as their difficult living conditions force Kitty and Walter to see each other in a different light.
Naomi Watts and Edward Norton are well matched, both offering powerful, complex performances. Stuart Dryburgh's cinematography and Alexandre Desplat's score are equally impressive. There are clear parallels drawn between the cholera epidemic and the diseased marriage between the central characters. Whether this conflation of national problems with Kitty and Walter's problems is offensive will probably depend on your point of view but, this problem aside, The Painted Veil is a deeply felt period film about the darkness of the human condition.
