Three London sisters are undone by the men — or lack thereof — in their lives over a four-day period in this glum slice-of-life picture. Hairdresser Debbie (Shirley Henderson) is raising her son Jack (Peter Marfleet) with little help from ex-husband Dan (Ian Hart), who can scarcely be trusted to watch the boy for a weekend. Nadia (Gina McKee) works in a cafe and is trying, without much success, to find a nice boyfriend through the personal ads. And Molly (Molly Parker), the youngest girl, is hugely pregnant by her boyfriend Eddie (John Simm), who's recently quit the sales job he despises but is too afraid to tell her. Meanwhile, their parents (Kika Markham, Jack Shepherd) bicker and snipe at each other, and their brother Darren (Enzo Cilenti), the baby of the family, has been AWOL for months, his absence leaving a void in all their hearts. The women fight, cry, laugh, sulk and go about the day-to-day business of their lives; their men mostly do nothing much, and when they do do something, it's usually bad. The parade of shallow guys Nadia meets just want to get laid. Dan takes Jack for the weekend and loses him. Eddie has a panic attack after a fight with Molly, gets into an accident on his motor scooter and leaves her to deal with the onset of labor alone. When it's all over, nothing much has changed, even though each of the sisters has weathered some manner of crisis. Shot in the jerky, grainy fashion of a verité documentary, the movie's material is familiar and Winterbottom doesn't have anything new to say about the ways men and women wound each other. But this morose drama's greatest asset is its cast, whose performances are so affectless that they scarcely seem to be acting at all. --Maitland McDonagh
