LONDON (Bloomberg) – Britain came close to cutting a deal with Hitler in the late 1930s. Writer-director Stephen Poliakoff shows you just how close in "Glorious 39."

His loosely historical movie illustrates the efforts deployed by the establishment to avert another world war. It's Poliakoff's first film in a decade; he has been busy making TV dramas, including the multiple Emmy winner "The Lost Prince."

"Glorious 39" is set on the sprawling estate of a Tory grandee who traces his family back a millennium and leads a genteel existence of black-tie dinners and Bentley excursions. He's married to a somewhat aloof lady who gardens, and they have three kids. Anne (Romola Garai), the eldest, is adopted.

A budding actress, Anne is devoted to her father, and the feeling is mutual; she lays on a lavish birthday for him in the opening scenes. Yet Anne soon grows suspicious of the milieu she has been adopted into.

Over dinner, a young cabinet member named Hector (David Tennant, the "Doctor Who" of the BBC television series) mentions rumours that Britain is about to pacify the Nazis by getting them a major loan. "Hitler is intent on taking over the whole of Europe, and we're letting him do it so long as it doesn't bother us," protests the tuxedo-clad Hector.

A few scenes later, Anne's fiance Lawrence (Charlie Cox) calls her to say that Hector is dead. Anne realises that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the chief advocate of appeasement, is on a crusade to silence opponents. When she finds Foreign Office archives stacked inside a shed on her family estate, she starts to wonder whether her blue-blood dad might not have a hand in the plot.

Poliakoff has crafted a psychological thriller with the spooky feel you get from a Hitchcock film. As a whodunit, his movie is effective. You're so engulfed by the intrigue that the shortage of on-set extras and the odd tatty costume don't matter; the film only cost $7.2 million.

The actors are steered with skill. Garai, who was in "Atonement," is a talented up-and-comer. Bill Nighy is outstanding as the caring father who may or may not have skeletons in the closet. Julie Christie does well as the dotty aunt, even though her character is two-dimensional.

"Glorious 39" teeters in its treatment of history. Poliakoff takes a documented fact – that the British secret services sought to derail the anti-appeasement camp – and exaggerates it into a plot where Chamberlain and his cohorts are on a deadly mission to neutralise a blonde actress.

No doubt because of that fictionalised take on history, "Glorious 39" is drawing mixed reactions. "How does Stephen Poliakoff get away with this stuff?" howled the Independent. At a post-screening talk in London, an American-accented woman accused Poliakoff of trivialising the Holocaust by showing "dreadful" scenes of sex and revellry during World War II.

Shrill reactions aside, "Glorious 39" does make you wonder what Britain might have been like had it allied with Hitler. Poliakoff, who is Jewish, has thought about it a lot. He says in the film notes that while he was busy researching the film, "I realised what a close-run thing it was that I'm here at all."