The Painted Veil

The Painted Veil (2006) is a period romance you can watch online on iFILM, directed by John Curran and starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts as a husband and wife stranded together by a cholera outbreak in 1920s China.

Adapted from Somerset Maugham's novel, the story follows Walter Fane, a reserved British bacteriologist who marries the restless, shallow Kitty more out of loneliness than love. When she betrays him, his revenge is quiet and cruel: he drags her into a remote, cholera-ravaged province where he intends to fight the epidemic himself. Far from London drawing rooms, surrounded by nuns, dying villagers and contaminated wells, two strangers in a marriage are forced to see each other clearly for the first time.

Norton also produced the film, which was shot across the river landscapes of Guangxi and Guangdong, with a score by Alexandre Desplat that took home a Golden Globe. This is slow, grown-up filmmaking about intimacy that arrives too late and hurts more for it. Stream The Painted Veil (2006) online on iFILM.