This is a brilliant example where filming--through the music, editing, camera panning & angles, colors, costumes, light positioning, non verbal acting and so on-translated a story to the audience with such depth and palpable emotions that the verbal dialogue and storyline become insignificant.



The meaning of the movie (or what the director translated from the novel) was conveying every nuance of the characters' emotions and distorted perceptions--especially the distorted perceptions of one innocent little girl in discovering sexual encounters she did not understand.



It is a rare gift when a director can make me squirm in my seat every time he tried to show the lurking emotions behind any of the characters expressions--be it lust, debauchery, love, passion, evil, desolation, and the death of innocence and hope.



Yes, it was love story torn apart by a foolish and misinformed child but that was the shallowest part you can grasp from the film. That was barely what the film was trying to convey!



This film was an artistic vision of what most of us experience in our childhood and young adulthood but what we most want to mask and keep hidden behind society's facade and social etiquette; it's about how our ugly yet beautiful realities can shape who we become or how dire those consequences can reach and destroy our whole lives. It's about how our minds can conjure such nasty and ugly thoughts yet at the same time feel beautiful emotions of love and passion. It's a dichotomy of chaos and order filtering in our minds--from spitefulness to atonement, and in our realties--from war to peace.



Consequence and time were also big themes in Atonement. The director showed that numerous times by making the shots have no editing with almost dance-like panning camera movements where the audience would think the time frame was going forward in the story-line when it was really going backward in time. The director also added many slow & fast motion rewinds to several crucial scenes--hence the feeling you get of how important time is in our lives and to try to savor it instead of rushing through it, as well as the serious consequence of not thinking before you act; and how one simple action can change myriad of events throughout one's lifetime.



It leaves you with the sense of how different one little girl's life and a loving couple's story would have been like without that one single letter that sealed their fate into a tragedy.



And in the end, the film conveys how fantasy, dreams and falsehoods may be the only things that can keep us sane and to endure.



This is not to be missed if you share a deep understanding of how through film--and not through dialogue and storyline--a piece of art can be portrayed as a portal of what we humans truly feel and what we hide most dearly in polite society.



Absolutely brilliant!