Two young English lovers on holiday in Venice meet a man who, after seducing them with his charm, invites them to stay in his beautiful Venetian palace. It is to prove a fatal meeting that will change their lives. Paul Schrader’s film is based on a novel by Ian McEwan with screenplay by Harold Pinter. An elegant and erotic psychological thriller, it analyses the experience of travel and the discomfort felt by travellers from a British point of view, set in an ‘eastern’ labyrinthine Venice, like an Arabian bazaar, oppressed by obsessive stifling heat.