Before You Know It

"Before You Know It" shifts seamlessly from quirky to sad to mysterious to wacky to surreal within just the infinite of a few days, so much so that you'd never know information technology'due south director Hannah Pearl Utt's feature filmmaking debut.

Co-writing the screenplay and co-starring alongside her longtime creative partner, Jen Tullock, Utt brings usa into a grounded and specific vision of New York Urban center, then has a blast blowing it all upward with knowingly explosive melodrama. Her film is at once twee and true, a tough residue to strike. The appealing messiness of the beginning gives way to a resolution that feels a scrap likewise tidy by the finish. But the strong performances from a cast composed of both veterans and bottom-known actors e'er requite the film an honest, attainable underpinning.

Utt and Tullock take a terrific, natural chemistry as sisters Rachel and Jackie Gurner, women in their 30s who still alive in their babyhood home: a brownstone over the small, Greenwich Village theater where they also work. Rachel is the stage manager and low-key voice of reason; Jackie is a brash and buoyant actress and the mother of a quietly angsty 12-yr-old girl named Dodge (Oona Yaffe). But they all live in the shadow of patriarch Mel Gurner (the e'er great Mandy Patinkin), a roaring, larger-than-life playwright whose work -- and whose entire personality, actually -- has long set the tone and direction of their being.

Rachel and Jackie are a report in extremes, their relationship marked past a lifetime of tension and resentment but too articulate affection. The former is minor and measured; in one of the moving picture'due south funniest lines, Jackie derides her sister for dressing "like a Mennonite caterer." The brash Jackie, meanwhile, is all cleavage and inappropriately brusk denim mini-skirts. Both women are obviously in need of love and approving, which their co-dependent human relationship with their towering strength of a father doesn't adequately provide.

But they all get ripped from their collective dysfunction when Mel dies (it happens early in the motion-picture show, folks) and the sisters learn that the mother they've long thought was dead is actually alive. She also happens to be a legendary soap opera star who works but near twoscore blocks uptown on the Upper West Side. In a sly bit of casting given that her piece of work on "I Life to Live" helped put her on the map decades ago, Judith Light gives a delightfully showy performance equally Sherrell, a fading diva struggling to stay relevant. She's a raging narcissist who veers betwixt tantrums and trembling frailty, and while Light intentionally goes over the top, she also finds places to explore her graphic symbol's vulnerability.

Watching all three of these women trip the light fantastic toe around each other and awkwardly experience out this newfound relationship offers both humor and a steadily simmer tension. Rachel and Jackie initially discover hope in this maternal connectedness just there'southward no escaping their past, resulting in a powerful scene in the ladies room at a splashy lather opera party where they finally let years of anger to chimera to the surface.

Long before then, though, we had a neat sense of who these people are by witnessing how they live. The family unit'due south colorful and crammed brownstone, the vivid piece of work of production designer Katie Hickman, radiates a believably lived-in feel. Ornate and richly hued, it's the outward representation of the family unit'south artistic, maverick vibe. It likewise provides a palpable sense of claustrophobia -- of the notion that these characters are stuck in every manner -- which Utt explores past following them in and out of bedrooms, bathrooms and hallways through long, fluid tracking shots equally they walk and talk.

Away from home, Yaffe'south Dodge strikes up a compelling new relationship of her ain: with the teenage daughter (Arica Himmel) of the family'southward accountant (charismatic "Luke Cage" star Mike Colter), whom she gets stuck with while her mom and aunt are busy being star struck. Yaffe and Himmel both brandish a great naturalism in their on-screen debuts, and their characters' connection offers a glimmer of hope as to what can happen when you dare to break old habits and flare-up out of your insular chimera. "Before Yous Know It" has a lot more to say than its bland title would advise.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Earlier that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly xv years and co-hosted the public telly serial "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving every bit managing editor. Read her answers to our Film Dearest Questionnaire here.

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Moving-picture show Credits

Before You Know It movie poster