Simply A Masterpiece

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

I am very disappointed that there where a lot of very low ratings for this movie by a good number of people. Personally I found that the movie was very captivating, and it made me want to understand better what was exactly happening all along. The costumes where marvelous, and the twist at the end (although I expected something similar, because it almost always happens in these kind of movies) was very good. It is a very good drama, however only for people that know how to appreciate it. People who like a lot of action, and not understanding will not appreciate it as much.

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

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.

This film is a must for fans of costume drama, which the British do so well. It has an unusual storyline, and evokes an atmosphere of the Victorian era really well. I don't want to give away too much of the storyline but basically it centres on the main character (a middle class spinster) and her relationship with one of the prisoners that she visits during her 'project'. I was glued to it all the way through and you feel 'drawn in' to film. There was a very good twist of the plot at the end which I certainly didn't see coming! A definite one for the girls - not sure guys would be so enthusiastic, although (without giving too much away) they may be interested in the developing 'friendship' of the two women!