“I thought, I know what this one is about,” Terence Davies said at a recent screening of his new film, “The Deep Blue Sea,” adapted from a play by Terence Rattigan. He was explaining why, when he was invited by the Rattigan Trust to film one of that playwright’s works, he had chosen this 1952 tale of adultery and romantic despair. (It was previously brought to the screen in 1955, starring Vivien Leigh in a role performed, in Mr. Davies’s version, by Rachel Weisz.)

This compact rendering — at once feverish and meticulous in its calibration of wanton emotions — proves just how deep Mr. Davies’s knowledge goes. Like most good plays “The Deep Blue Sea” is about many things. It is, in the most literal sense, about England in the years just after World War II, a period of weary austerity and quiet hope that Mr. Davies, born in Liverpool in 1945, has returned to again and again in the course of his filmmaking career. His autobiographical masterpieces “Distant Voices, Still Lives” (1988) and “The Long Day Closes” (1993) evoke, from a child’s point of view, the pleasures and anxieties of a time when Britain, still traumatized by the war, seemed poised uneasily between the old and the new.

(New Yorkers can see “Distant Voices” on Friday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which concludes a retrospective of Mr. Davies’s films on Monday. “The Long Day Closes” will run for a week at Film Forum starting on Wednesday.)

Rattigan was one of the dominant British literary figures of that era, though his reputation faded in subsequent decades, eclipsed by angry young men, kitchen-sink realists and a flamboyant avant-garde. Mr. Davies, an unabashed nostalgist for pre-’60s, unswinging England — he memorably trashes the Beatles in “Of Time and the City,” his 2008 love letter to Liverpool — lovingly recalls the dust, the chintz, the popular songs and the women’s fashions of the old days. He also has an intuitive understanding of the strong feelings that lie beneath the dusty decorum and constrained behavior before the language of sexual liberation and personal fulfillment (to say nothing of feminism) had entered the lexicon of the Western democracies.