"Within the Whirlwind" tells the story of a woman who is sent to a Gulag and already lost hope when she meets a doctor that brings back her will to live and a sense of purpose in life.

Undoubtedly, the movie tells a tremendous story and is in many ways very touching. All actors deliver a solid performance and you can see that producers tried to treat the topic with dignity and empathy. However, personally I think that in ways of storytelling and filmmaking, this film lacks a few percent to divide it from the many better tv productions that have dealt with similar stories and topics in the last years.

All in all this is by no means a bad movie and will probably touch a lot of people very strongly. However as someone who has seen a lot of movies within this very genre, I just have to say that it doesn't stand out in my opinion.

Marleen Gorris obviously got off to a flying start with the chilingly remarkable (but in so many ways also unremarkable) story of Yevgenia Ginzburg, which had to be smuggled out of the USSR in 1967, even though Ginzburg - more or less a lifelong communist - had by then been "rehabilitated" after years of arrest and persecution and imprisonment - obviously for no reason whatever.

But even beyond that, the film does well; indeed supremely well; in its first half-hour when we see a real-life story of Soviet life played out a la George Orwell's "1984". Is that the genius of Orwell, or does the film draw on the latter? I do not know the answer to that, but it will look staggering and shocking for many who give this work the time it assuredly deserves.

As it happens, I'm an old and experienced "tales of life under communism" expert, so I admire the portrayal and presentation more than being surprised by it; but I know there are countless millions out there who will not conceive of the idea that that which Orwell encapsulated so amazingly was reality again and again and again under Stalin. And even Stalin's death did not bring an end to it fully, of course, but...

Yevgenia becomes a kind of "unperson" by association, but it transpires that all those who brought about her downfall were also purged, and we watch them go down one by one.

Hence the absolute need for films like this to be made ... and watched.

Forgive me for this, but the second section of the film in the prison camp looks a tad more familiar - weird and authentic-looking mix of the cruel, crude and eccentrically enigmatic as it may be. But those who spent long years - even decades - of their lives in such places (assuming they actually survived at all),eventually found some weird kind of accommodation with the situation, as we see here.

Never a particular Emily Watson fan was I, but here she does extremely well in the starring role, and what somehow keeps University Professor "Eugenia" going is her love of Russian literature and culture ... of all things. This fierce pride and determination is tangible in the film context. And our hero really does meet up (and fall in love) with a doctor of German origin shipped off to the Soviet Far East from the Volga region, and also imprisoned for a long stretch indeed.

And so much of what we see here is true, and there is death and suffering and separation everywhere, and for years on end.

As I say, it is perhaps hard to mess up such a gift of an epic tale as this, but Polish locations (with a touch of Polish-inspired film-making class),plus Watson and a number of other seasoned British and Polish actors, carry things along, and there are a host of meaningful directoral touches that leaves this art largely irreproachable. There is also most moving music, not least an extract from the ever-soulful Frederic Chopin.

Had it maintained the utter brilliance of its first third, this film would have garnered a ten from me without hesitation. As it is a well-desrved 9!

How to convey in one story the essence of decades of Stalin-induced misery> This is how...

The cinematography, costumes, locations, props, etc of this movie are truly excellent. It's a joy to watch, and Emily Watson's capabilities make the journey even easier. To be honest, on that basis, with a competent script, it's pretty hard to rate this movie below an 8. However, there are many other movies now that cover the same sort of themes and historical period that are beyond excellent. Way back when I was a boy I saw Alan Bates in the 1968 biopic The Fixer. That gave the audience some real punches to the gut. The Way Back (2010) had a real sense of gravity. In Transit (2008) had gravity and punches to the gut, not to mention the terrors of Shindler's List. What I'm trying to say here is that Within The Whirlwind is more of a weak slap and though it has gravity, of course it does, especially the well-presented early part that chronicles the process of Stalin's Purge, the gravity is more or less routine. You see it coming. I think the title here is misleading, a mistake. I realise, having seen the movie, it's about love within a terrible and unjust penal system, but, to me, it sort of conjures up the wickedness and extremes of Siberia. So where are the raging storms? The unrelenting rain? The animal brutality of the guards? As an educational film for high school children, Whirlwind is (probably) a safe bet. But as a piece of theatre that will truly shock sympathies out of an audience, well, I'd have liked to have seen the film-makers aim a little higher.