The true story tells the tale of a Scottish second lieutenant, Eric Lomax (Colin Firth) who was captured by the Japanese in Singapore during the war, and shipped off to a camp in Thailand, where he suffered terrible tortures, and was forced to help build the infamous bridge over the River Kwai, as seen in David Lean’s epic (Jeremy Irvine). Years later, he still suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, until his second wife, Patricia Wallace (Nicole Kidman), helped him to seek out closure by writing to his former captor (Hiroyuki Sanada).