Irish Film Institute -International Film Directory – Film Listing

Unless

    • Director

      Alan Gilsenan

    • Principal Cast

      Catherine Keener
      Hannah Gross
      Matt Craven

  • Category

    Feature

Reta Winters (Catherine Keener) has many reasons to be happy: her three teenage daughters, her twenty‐year relationship with her husband, and her work as a successful translator and novelist. But suddenly, all the quiet satisfactions of her life disappear when her eldest daughter, Norah (Hannah Gross), drops out of college and leaves home for a Toronto street corner, refusing to speak and holding a sign that says simply ‘Goodness’.

The film follows Reta and her family as they struggle first to ‘rescue’ Norah, then to understand her incomprehensible decision, and finally to accept her strange path and include her as she is as best they can.

Adapted by Alan Gilsenan from the last novel of the late, great Carol Shields, this haunting film weaves big concepts of family, faith and humanity into an enigmatic and deeply memorable drama.

Notes by Sunniva O’Flynn

Classification: 15A

90 minutes, Canada-Ireland, 2016, Colour

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