Plot
Legendary filmmaker Mike Leigh returns to the modern world with a wild, compassionate, and often darkly humorous study of family and the delicate bonds that bind us together. The astonishing Marianne Jean-Baptiste, reuniting with Leigh for the first time since the Oscar-nominated Secrets and Lies, plays Pansy, a woman racked with fear, plagued by illness, and given to furious tirades at her husband, son, and anyone who looks her way. Meanwhile, her easygoing younger sister, played by Michele Austin (“Another Year”), is a single mother whose life is as different from Pansy’s as their contrasting temperaments—filled with the shared warmth of both her clients and her daughters. This sweeping film from a master playwright introduces us to the intensity of kinship, duty, and that most enduring of human mysteries: that even through a lifetime of pain and hardship, we still find ways to love those we call family.
