Another Life (1999) - Synopsis

Another Life (1999) - heading

One dark night in October 1922 Percy Thompson is attacked by an unknown assailant as he walks home from the theatre with his wife Edie. Shocked and hysterical, Edie raises the alarm, but it's too late. Her husband is already dead.

As she is escorted home, Edie reflects upon the events that have lead to this fateful night and she retraces the innocent heady days when she first fell in love with Percy Thompson, her childhood sweetheart.

Recollecting the excitement of her life as a career woman, earning more money than her husband, Edie also remembers the early years of her marriage, before the First World War. Sadly, she became disillusioned as Percy revealed himself as a tedious and irritating dullard. By contrast, she recalls the day when she was introduced to her sister's suitor, the exciting, virile and handsome Freddie Bywaters.

Embarking on a passionate affair with Freddie, a young sailor ten years her junior, Edie's ability to embellish reality with fantasy is the keynote to her character, and in Freddie she finds somebody who can match her passion and thirst for romance. Tragically she doesn't realise the extent of her power and influence over the hot-headed young Freddie. When the lovers indulge in a foolish fantasy, inventing unrealistic schemes to do a way with her husband, little does she realise that Freddie is about to translate their game into action.

On that dark night in 1922, it's Freddie Bywaters who steps out of the shadows and stabs Percy Thompson to death.

Despite huge public outcry and Bywaters' adamant assertion that Edie had no hand in Percy's death, she is found guilty of murder alongside her lover and both are sent to the gallows.

Edie's imaginary world collides horribly with reality and she learns too late, to appreciate the ordinary life she spent years dreaming of escaping.