Regeneration

Craiglockhart military hospital in 1917. Officers who have come from the front and can no longer fight are sent here. The psychiatrist William Rivers is charged with curing them, and being cured means becoming fit to go back to the front. Among the patients is the poet Siegfried Sassoon, sent here for writing a letter openly criticising the war. Wilfred Owen is in the same hospital. Gillies MacKinnon directed the film from Pat Barker's novel, with a screenplay by Allan Scott. Jonathan Pryce plays Rivers, James Wilby plays Sassoon and Stuart Bunce plays Owen. The film's question is about the doctor's own work: curing men and sending them back to be killed. Sassoon's letter and the poems Owen wrote there are real; both of them went back to the war.