A film that’s been almost a decade in the making and was officially announced back in 2015, Lee is finally (nearly) here and you’ll definitely need tissues at the ready.

Lee may be centred around the life of Lee Miller, an American model turned second world war photographer, but it’s not a biopic. We don’t see anything from her modelling days or her life after the war. Instead, the film centres around the most significant decade of Miller’s life, when she travelled to Europe to capture the horror of WWII on the ground.

The fact there hasn’t been a Lee Miller-inspired film until now was something that both surprised me but also signified a typical trend in the entertainment industry where women’s stories take a lot more work to be shown and heard. And Miller’s story deserves to be told.

Taking on the role of Miller is Kate Winslet, who’s been attached to the film since the beginning and serves as a producer, and she plays the fearlessness, humour and emotion of Lee Miller in a quietly beautiful way. The film takes us through Miller’s role in WWII and how she went from capturing women at home to fighting to be on the frontline of the war to give a voice to the voiceless. The structure of the film, which sees flashbacks interspersed with an older Miller telling the story to Josh O’Connor’s curious interviewer in the 1970s, also works well for this story – especially as these interviewing scenes end with an interesting twist.

What Miller captured on film in Dachau and throughout Europe was shocking and horrific, so much so that her employer, British Vogue, refused to print them at the time. Her photographs of the war, its victims and its consequences remain among the most significant and historically important of the second world war. Miller’s most notorious work, however, was staging a photo of herself inside Hitler’s private bathtub, which Winslet portrays with such grit and poignancy in the film that it becomes a pivotal moment in Lee, for both the characters and the audience.

Alongside Winslet and O’Connor, the film also stars Andy Samberg, who plays Life Magazine photographer David E Scherman, Alexander Skarsgård, who is the painter and photographer Roland Penrose, Andrea Riseborough as British Vogue editor Audrey Withers, and Marion Cotillard as Solange D’Ayen, the fashion director of French Vogue and a close friend of Miller’s.

For me, Samberg’s performance as Scherman is the standout part of this film. We typically know him from comedic projects, such as Brooklyn Nine-Nine and SNL, but his portrayal of a photographer thrown into a world war and how this changes him as both a man and photographer is truly brilliant – a far cry from his usual funny tendencies. Samberg proves that he’s more than capable of taking on more serious roles and brings a rawness and emotion to Scherman, culminating in a scene where he breaks down sobbing in Miller’s arms after witnessing and capturing the most harrowing and horrific violence during the Holocaust.

Lee was clunky in parts when it comes to the narrative and plot but it’s the characters that really drive home the remarkable emotion and power of this story and I had to wipe away some (read: many) tears as I left the cinema.

Lee will be released in cinemas on 13 September

Images: Sky