The result is that the extremes of his appearance (he himself has remarked on his own facial likeness to “an otter”) seem smoothed down, the better to catch the emotion signaled by his pale blue eyes. Restraint and intensity are dual poles governing the film’s action, helped by a typically true, understated performance by Macdonald as the two clash and come together in their tragically derailed love story.

As a mother, I try at all costs to stay away from movies about dead or abducted children, but—and this is less of a spoiler alert than a refresher alert—things never get gruesome, and we are allowed to believe that the child is alive. It’s just a matter of where.

And when: The key to this drama, and one that left some British viewers confused, is its embrace of the concept of time as non-linear; more simultaneous than sequential. Stephen is haunted by a sense of déjà vu. At one point, he looks through a pub window at his mother, unmarried and pregnant with him, contemplating her future. Meanwhile, the child inside the man is another subplot, and not an entirely satisfactory one. Stephen’s best friend is the British prime minister, who resigns and retreats to a country house where he reverts to a second boyhood, running around the woods and climbing trees, an awkward role rather overplayed by Stephen Campbell Moore (who happens to be Claire Foy’s husband IRL).

I say, go with it. Let the lovely English landscapes, and the haunting power of memory and regret, wash over you, like they do in life. It may not make perfect sense, but there are worse ways to spend 90 minutes than in Cumberbatch’s excellent company, letting the layers of experience fold over each other like shifting sands.