Edith Wharton’s celebrated novel The House of Mirth traces the rise and fall of the alluring socialite Lily Bart during the Gilded Age of the turn of the 20th century. An independent-minded young woman in an era that brooked no rebellion against its rules, Lily struggles with the need for a "good marriage" and against the passion she feels for a young but penniless suitor. The film’s power derives from Davies’ ability to compel us to identify with Lily, even as she is driven ever closer to her doom: not physical violence, but a closing-off of available aspirations, a kind of enveloping economic and social extinction whose suffocation is made palpable by actor Gillian Anderson, by Davies’ careful attention to her performance, and by the mise-en-scène that entomb both spectator and protagonist within symmetrical interiors in compositions that both soothe and smother.