Pip, a 10-year old orphan boy from a working class family, is surprised one winter's day by an escaped convict who demands food and tools to remove his chains. Terrified, Pip does as he's asked but the convict is ambushed and thrown back into his dreadful gaol, the prison ships that border the marshes by Pip's home.

A year later, Pip is employed by eccentric Miss Havisham, a local gentlewoman who has lived in seclusion since being abandoned at the altar 30 years ago and has never since seen daylight. Pip is to act as a companion to Miss Havisham's devastatingly beautiful 12-year-old ward, Estella. Pip falls in love with her and longs to become a gentleman in order to win her back when he's of age. It's a hopeless fantasy. The children part and Pip becomes an apprentice to his kindly brother-in-law Joe, the village blacksmith.

Ten years later, Pip, now a young man, receives the astonishing news that he has been given a huge fortune by an unnamed benefactor and is required to abandon Joe and his humble country life to be educated as a gentleman in London. Astonishingly, his childish hopes are fulfilled and he can now become the sophisticated young man he hoped to be during his childhood days with Estella.

But Great Expectations is a cruelly ironic title, as Pip's hopes founder on the discovery that his benefactor is none other than Abel Magwitch, the former convict he helped on the marshes all those years ago. Pip's money, his aspirations, and his sense of self are tainted by his connection to Magwitch, a violent criminal: and so Pip's story is set in motion and we watch his fate take him by the throat.

 

Classification 12

 

Film released by KRS