Vera is given no chance to explain and must remain passive, resigned to whatever her jealous husband will decide. Only later, in a prolonged flashback, will we start to understand what Vera intended. Even then, to the trained eye, the best explanation for her apparent confession would be that she is deeply clinically depressed.

Vera displays many symptoms: impaired reality-testing, low mood, tearfulness, lassitude and inertia. She appears hopeless, helpless and worthless. A psychiatric diagnosis, however, explains the situation on one level only.

The film's title, ‘The Banishment', refers to Adam and Eve's dismissal from the Garden of Eden, from the Book of Genesis. A number of other Biblical themes also appear in the film, pointing directly at a spiritual dimension to Vera's plight.

The children visit neighbours' children, for example, and we see them working on a large jig-saw with an image of the Archangel Gabriel announcing to the Virgin Mary that she is to bear the son of God. 

At night, one of these same children is given St Paul's exceptional sermon on love to read aloud at bedtime. Love, it says, "Does not rejoice at wrongdoing but with the truth..." (1 Cor: 13.) Vera's name, of course, suggests truth; and her daughter; whose name is Eva, the same as Adam's wife; insists on fruit from the almond orchard, and is later asked to fetch her mother an apple. These are valuable clues to the story's intended context.

Later, at the film's close, peasants harvesting break into a powerful hymn, which is taken up over the final credits by the voices of a Russian Orthodox cathedral choir. As if to signify divine acquiescence at the end of the parable, the flow of the stream returns after a cloudburst, and a peasant woman carries a healthy new child into the picture across the screen... But by then the film's great tragedy has unfolded.

In the flashback, we learn that her pregnancy drove Vera to try and take her own life. After the overdose failed, she contacted her husband's colleague Robert, who helped her recover from and conceal the episode. She told him of her conviction that no child belonged properly to its parents, only to God. That, rather than sexual infidelity, was why she made her fatal confession to Alex. She did not want her next child to be groomed for a dishonest life, like the others.

Meanwhile, Alex has concluded - on the basis of a chance remark from his ten year old son - that Vera had been unfaithful with Robert. His mind becomes set on two things: destruction of the pregnancy and revenge. Mark calls in the abortionists, two men who seem capable and well-prepared, and Vera submits silently. Within hours, however, she is dead. There may have been complications of the procedure, or she may have taken another overdose. Some sedatives and painkillers had been left to ease her pain. It is unclear, but Alex is clearly in anguish as he packs a gun and heads off to the city in search of the man he thinks has made him both a cuckold and a widower.

Only then, late in this hauntingly beautiful and slow-moving film, in which you can practically see the thoughts and emotions unfolding in the minds of the characters, do we get the flashback revealing the truth, and Alex's torment seems to soften with the knowledge that Vera had, in his terms, been faithful after all. He puts the gun aside, deciding that he must be the one to break the sad news to his children.

In the final scene, Alex stops his car to rest and collect his thoughts beside the road in the idyllic countryside. Close by, peasants bend their backs to the harvest and, as he drives off, start to sing.

Vera reminds me of a patient I saw years ago, totally mute in her depression. Her husband was perhaps similarly engaged in a business about which she was forced to keep silent. He wanted her fixed up immediately, to resume her role as his wife and the mother of his children. I explained to him that we would need time and much more information, but he declined to answer questions, and straightaway made arrangements for his wife to go to a more amenable psychiatric facility elsewhere. She was lost to follow-up. I can only hope that her fate was less tragic than Vera's, a type of martyrdom.

To know and feel deeply that those you associate with closely are doing wrong, and to be unable to change it or speak up about it (or be heard when you do), is to experience a classical ‘double-bind', the cause, according to 1970's theorist Gregory Bateson, of psychotic thought patterns, but also of creative new thinking. Without an intuitively inventive solution, despair and madness beckon. Such wisdom-based remedies, when they do arrive, often seem like sudden gifts of grace, arising in the context of earnest, sometimes prolonged reflection, even prayer, and have a surprising, positive and decidedly spiritual quality. We did not see that in this film but something else, something like you feel at the end of King Lear or Macbeth: the tragedy has played itself out, and great, bittersweet truths about human frailty have been revealed. There are the dead and there are survivors... Such is life! If we have learned something, we can avoid the mistakes and do better next time.

Physical treatments for severe depression, such as medication and ECT, may provide symptom relief, but more is required if complete healing and relapse prevention are to be achieved. Personal growth will also be the outcome when a deep and sympathetic understanding of the dynamics, and of relevant spiritual factors, is deployed. Healing methods incorporating a spiritual element are usually therefore the best.

Copyright Larry Culliford