Directed by Jon Amiel

Based on the outstanding biography of Charles Darwin by his great grandson Randal Keynes (Annie's Box), this beautifully made film succeeds against the odds in making science and the tricky subject of belief or otherwise in God meaningful and interesting. It centres on the period in Darwin's life when he was agonising about publishing On the Origin of Species and turning the comfortable, spiritually ordered nineteenth century world upside down, with flashbacks to a key event in his own spiritual life, the illness and death of his beloved eldest daughter, Annie.

Paul Bettany gives a beautifully sympathetic and credible version of Darwin, paradoxically both full of life, and chronically sick; bold, and fearful of disturbing the status quo. American Jennifer Connelly, Bettany's real wife, plays his intelligent and devout wife Emma, her slightly off-kilter accent somehow convincing as that of a middle class Victorian lady. The Darwin family life was surprisingly unconventional, not at all what we think of as Victorian, the kids running riot around the house, brought up to challenge ideas and to experiment. Perhaps too much is made in the film of Darwin's illness being psychological in origin, stemming from grief and guilt at Annie's death, and the rather simplistic view that coming to terms with it is what frees him from the reluctance to publish his theory. Certainly watching nature take its harsh course with a daughter he adored may have completed his journey to atheism, but his illness seems, after all, more likely to have been caused by some parasite or disease picked up on his voyages.

However difficult it may be for us in this material world to imagine the shock and impact of the theory of a world making its own patterns without a benevolent god-creator, the film almost effortlessly conveys those feelings. It uses many images of a beautiful, powerful nature to illustrate the circles of death, decay and rebirth. Darwin was mockingly called a monkey, and his daughter's sickness and death is paralleled by scene-stealer extraordinary, Jennie the orang utan. Indeed Jennie, captured and taken from her paradise through her bright curiosity, and falling sick in captivity, is a sad parallel to the Adam and Eve myths in the bible which Darwin felt he was destroying forever. But the overwhelming effect of the film is, like Darwin's writing, of an open-minded joy in discovery and knowledge, whatever it brings, and the beauty of truth.

Seen at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, November 2009