Grief, guilt, and betrayal. In London's East End, a young mother dotes on her four-year-old son and lives in a modest flat with her husband, a cop in the bomb squad. The Arsenal football team is their religion. On May Day, a major terrorist attack brings tragedy while she is in the arms of a rich reporter who lives over the road. She wishes she were dead. In grief and guilt, she pursues revenge, faces betrayal, experiences delusions, and may be suicidal. Two men seek her affection: the reporter and a colleague of her husband's who imagines caravan camping with her on a beach. In London, the city of the Great Fire and of Hitler's bombardment, is there any way back to life for her?

Natalie Dormer filmed two days, playing the role of Ewan McGregor's girlfriend, but her role ended up on the cutting room floor. Nevertheless, she called it a "great experience".

Young Mother:
I wonder, did you celebrate when you heard my boys got killed? Did you turn on the radio and hear them say a thousand and three dead? Did you put down your mouth over the rocks and kneel down to pray? I prayed. I prayed for the deaths toll to go up to a thousand and four and take me too.

Continuity: In the scene where her husband's boss is taking her to the memorial for the dead, her facial cuts are quite healed and well into the scarring stage. But a few minutes later in the scene where she's watching home movies, her facial cuts appear to be freshly scabbed over and quite irritated around the edges.