Ashley Judd has a word for it: ‘Franklinisation’. That, says the star of High Crimes, is what the film’s director, Carl Franklin, has brought to the film: his ability to transform an ordinary story into something exceptional. “Carl can take what could have been standard, obligatory ‘thriller’ moments and put a special spin on them,” she says. “He’d always be thinking about the details of a scene - about how to invigorate the story.”

Not that High Crimes is in any way your standard, obligatory thriller. Based on a novel by CIA expert Joseph Finder, who has been crafting tales of international espionage for over a decade, it tells the story of a perfect marriage which all but disintegrates when a dark secret from the past emerges. In many ways, it puts Judd’s character in a situation similar to the one she experienced in Double Jeopardy: stunned into disbelief as the carpet is pulled out from under her, then fighting back with all the skills and means at her disposal. Except that, this time, she already has just the skills she needs: she is a top lawyer.

Freeman with director Carl Franklin who, says Judd, has his own unique way with actors and scripts.

Judd plays Claire Kubik, a successful defence attorney with a picture-book marriage and home in Marin County. The idyll is briefly disrupted by a break-in, then torpedoed by the arrival of FBI agents to arrest her husband, Tom (Jim Caviezel). Claire is told that, under his ‘real’ name of Ronald Chapman, Tom was an undercover military agent in El Salvador where he was responsible for the murder of a number of civilians.

To Claire’s horror, Tom admits to his former identity, even if he denies the murders: he was the fall guy for the real killers, he tells her. Having discovered that her husband is not who he said he was, Claire begins to wonder whether he is telling her the truth here as well, but commits herself to help defend him in a top-secret military court with its own set of rules. Shaken by the inexperience of the young military lawyer assigned to defend Tom, Claire realises that she will have to do the job herself - and that she will need some help from outside the normal channels.

“The novel had this wonderful premise about a female criminal-defence lawyer who ends up having to defend her husband,” says producer Janet Yang. “Claire makes tough, almost impossible choices throughout the story. We thought that was something both men and certainly women could relate to.”