Australian actor Odessa Young plays Jane, the maid at a grand house ruled over by the sad Mr and Mrs Niven (Colin Firth and Olivia Colman) who are not making a fuss about their children being dead. Jane is having a secret, passionate affair with Paul, beguilingly played by Josh O’Connor, the well-born son of the Nivens’ neighbours, the Sheringhams, and on Mothering Sunday, her day off, she has plans to bicycle over to Paul’s house while his parents and servants are away, for a secret assignation.

Paul is the only one of his peer group to have returned from the Front, and burdened by his survivor’s guilt and the realisation that so much is now expected of him: including a prestigious legal career and marriage to someone who isn’t a maid.

It is a lovely-looking, lovely-sounding movie, handsomely designed, meticulously shot and impeccably performed – and it also has interesting things to say about the emotional toughness. But we have to admit that, despite our liking for slow cinema, we found something a bit indulgent and classy about the unvarying andante pace. We wanted a jolt of passion, of anger, of something, to wake this film out of its dreamy melancholy. But then it has to be said that this moonscape is very well crafted and Olivia Colman does, in her way, deliver a jolt of rage mixed with a swallowed despair.

Jane has ambitions to be a writer, and later you see the older, more mature Jane who is in a relationship with academic philosopher Donald (Sope Dirisu) and later Glenda Jackson has a cameo as Jane as the renowned and elderly star author, disconcerting journalists with her unimpressed reaction to news that she has won a certain big prize. Jane is an orphan, and Mrs Niven, in her cynical wretchedness and despair, tells her that being born bereaved and motherless is a great gift: she has no-one to care about. Of course, we know that this isn’t true. But Odessa Young shows us that it is not an entirely inaccurate description of Jane; she is tough, she has that writer’s detachment.

There is a lot to admire in this film, though we wanted a bolt of lightning to burst through the cloudcover of sadness.