Acclaimed filmmaker and playwright Mike Leigh returns to the contemporary world—after his prickly biopic Mr. Turner and his uprising epic Peterloo—with a fierce, compassionate, and often darkly humorous study of family and the frayed ties that bind us.
Reunited with Leigh for the first time since multiple Oscar-nominated Secrets and Lies, the astonishing Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a woman wracked by fear, tormented by afflictions, and prone to raging tirades against her husband, son, and anyone who looks her way—recalling the hair-trigger main character of Leigh’s masterpiece Naked but with a more relatable twist. Meanwhile, her warm, easygoing, preternaturally patient younger sister (Michele Austin, Another Year), is a single mother with a life as different from Pansy’s as their clashing temperaments.
This intimate film is full of the rich character work that distinguishes Leigh’s filmography, burrowing into the intensities of kinship, duty, and the most enduring of human mysteries: that even through lifetimes of hurt and hardship, we still find ways to love those we call family.