Mother and daughter Thelma and Jessie Cates spend a night together after Jessie reveals that she will kill herself by the end of it in this cinema adaptation of Marsha Norman's Pulitzer prize-winning Broadway play.

What would you do if someone you loved sat down with you one night and calmly told you that they were going to end their life before morning? This is Thelma Cates' dilemma. Her daughter Jessie has had it. A middle-aged epileptic unable to drive or hold a job, with a failed marriage and a drug-addicted runaway son on the wrong side of the law, Jessie can find no reason to keep living. Adapted from the play by Marsha Norman, "'night, Mother" is the story of a parent's worst nightmare. How can Thelma convince her daughter that life is worth living if she can't feel her pain? How can she end her daughter's embrace of death before morning?—Mark Fleetwood <[email protected]>/Reid Taylor