Red Joan

In May 2000, the quiet retirement of an elderly woman in London ends when British intelligence officers arrive at her home and arrest her on suspicion of having passed secrets to the Soviet Union decades earlier. The accusation forces Joan Stanley to confront a past she had kept hidden for more than fifty years, reaching back to her student days at Cambridge, where she studied physics and fell in love with Leo Galich, a young man of Russian origin with ties to the communist movement. As the Second World War reshaped the world and Joan took a government post connected to secret nuclear research, the divide between her personal loyalties and her official position set the course of the rest of her life. The story moves between that wartime past and the interrogation of an old woman being asked to account for her actions.

Trevor Nunn directed, working from a screenplay by Lindsay Shapero; David Parfitt produced. The film came late in a directing career that had begun with Lady Jane in 1986 and continued through Twelfth Night, Cats and Oklahoma!, before Red Joan arrived in 2018. Judi Dench plays the older Joan, with Sophie Cookson as the young Joan, alongside Tom Hughes, Tereza Srbova, Stephen Campbell Moore and Ben Miles.

The film took about 11 million dollars worldwide, a modest return for a British period drama. On IMDb it holds 6.4/10 from roughly 16,000 votes and on TMDB 6.6/10 from about 400 votes, while a critics' rating of 5/10 from 150 reviews sits below both audience scores.