The Lesson

Liam Somers has spent years on a novel he can't seem to finish when an agency offers him a tutoring job. His pupil is Bertie, the teenage son of J.M. Sinclair, the writer Liam idolises above all others, and the job is to get the boy through Oxford's entrance exam. He moves into a small house on the family's sprawling country estate, where Sinclair's wife Hélène makes him sign a non-disclosure agreement before she leaves him alone with her son.

The family still hasn't got over the recent death of Felix, the elder son, and nobody mentions him. Sinclair hasn't published in years and pays Liam to proofread the novel he's finishing, but the hero worship turns sour, and Liam ends up caught in a game of family secrets and score-settling, all of it hanging on the writer's favourite line: good writers borrow, great writers steal.

'The Lesson' was the first feature for both its director and its writer: Alice Troughton came from television, where her credits include 'Doctor Who', and the writer, Alex MacKeith, is also a stand-up comedian. Richard E. Grant, Oscar-nominated for 'Can You Ever Forgive Me?', plays Sinclair and took most of the critics' praise. Daryl McCormack, from 'Good Luck to You, Leo Grande', is Liam, with Julie Delpy as Hélène and Stephen McMillan as Bertie.

The story is set near Oxford, but it was shot in Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein in the summer of 2022, with a house in Reinbek standing in for the Sinclair estate. Bleecker Street had bought the US rights at Cannes that May, when the film was still called 'The Tutor'. Isobel Waller-Bridge, sister of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, wrote the waltz-driven score.

It premiered at Tribeca in June 2023, opened in US cinemas on 7 July and reached UK and Irish cinemas on 22 September, rated 15 by the BBFC. Reviews were broadly positive, if cooler on the final act, and it went on to earn a Saturn Award nomination for best thriller, losing out to 'Oppenheimer'.

• Thriller
• Drama