After some years of tension, Richard (Clive Owen) begins a sexual relationship with his sister Natalie (Saskia Reeves). Now married, the relationship proves dangerously obsessional. Their private intensity (& working class origins) contrast with the middle-class, inhibited, stuffy public scenes we see in the Richmond world into which Natalie has moved with her marriage. As the guilt and intensity of the siblings increases we seem to be heading for disaster, a forboding which increases when Natalie's husband Sinclair finds out.
In fourteenth-century England, peasant girl Christine Carpenter is so attracted to a statue of the Virgin Mary that the local priest (who lusts after her) suggests she be walled up in the church as an anchoress, a holy woman with responsibility for blessing the villagers. But when the priest has Christine's mother tried as a witch, she digs herself out of her cell, a crime for which the punishment is death.