How Long Can a Marriage Ignore the Wound?

The film Midwinter Break opens with an intimate flashback to the Troubles of Ireland: A very pregnant Stella is shot by an Irish Republican Army sniper; the milk bottle she just purchased shatters to the ground, her own blood pooling alongside the spilt milk. The trauma is vivid, but its extent is not yet known. 

The novel on which the film is based, also named Midwinter Break, begins far more quietly. Rather than announcing its central wound at once, it allows the trauma to surface gradually, disclosed in fragments as the chapters unfold.