Firelight

Firelight (1998) is a British period drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed and written by William Nicholson — who later wrote the screenplay for Gladiator — and set in Sussex in 1838.

Elisabeth (Sophie Marceau), a Swiss governess short on money, enters a private arrangement with an English landowner: three anonymous nights together, in exchange for enough to clear her father's debts. She hands over the resulting child and disappears. Seven years later she takes a post as governess at a remote estate and finds that her employer is Charles Godwin (Stephen Dillane) — the same man — and that the girl in her care is the daughter she gave up. Neither Louisa nor the household knows. Both adults do.

Nicholson writes Victorian restraint with real bite; the tension here is not romantic suspense in any conventional sense, but the slow weight of two people holding a secret that keeps getting harder to keep. Stream Firelight online on iFILM.