Costume dramas featuring dashing Romantic poets wooing dreamy young fillies have traditionally demanded stately aristrocratic piles, mean-minded old dowagers and yards of linen petticoats.

Director Jane Campion's rejection of the Merchant-Ivory template is a breath of fresh air, lending the story of the doomed love between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne an authentic edge.

Ben Whishaw plays the writer as a struggling artist, cursed by grinding poverty and constantly worn down by failing health as he struggles to establish himself.

Next door Fanny Brawne (Cornish), the daughter of a kindly Hampstead widow (Fox), is intrigued by the secretive young man and is determined to seek him out even if it mean's igniting the ire of Keats' protective companion, the boorish Mr Brown (Paul Schneider).

Initially indifferent, Keats is slowly captivated, touched by her concern for the fate of his dying brother and then attracted by her well-meant interest in his work. ("I confess I do not find your poems easy," she tells him).

Like director Joe Wright's impressive adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, this shrugs off the musty restraints of costumed stereotypes and concentrates exclusively on the slowburning affair as Keats finds himself "dissolving" as love draws him in.

There are some striking scenes, none more exquisite than when Fanny releases a rabble of butterflies into her bedroom or when she reclines, dizzily in love, in a field full of bluebells.

Campion skillfully avoids cheap emotional payoffs and the scene when Fanny is convulsed in grief at the news of Keats death in Rome aged 25 is one of the most powerful you will see all year.

Tim Evans