Maintaining his industrious efforts in delivering a film each year, Michael Winterbottom brings us his latest feature EVERYDAY; bringing him back to the grey climes of England after sojourns to India and Texas in TRISHNA and THE KILLER INSIDE ME respectively. Shirley Henderson stars (in her sixth collaboration with Winterbottom) alongside John Simm, in a project elegantly pieced together and filmed over the space of five years. The film charts the tumultuous nature of a family torn apart, and the love they express from an unavoidable distance.

Henderson plays Karen, a tireless and put upon mother to four young children and wife to Ian (Simm), who is serving out an unspecified jail sentence in a far away prison. Separated by a lengthy commute, Karen and Ian try desperately to keep their marriage afloat through frequent visits and the knowledge that they will, one day, be reunited. As months turn into years, the isolation and frustrations of incarceration being to take their toll on Ian as he is moved from one facility to another. Karen begins to struggle with the emotional weight of caring for four (moderately behaved) kids and only being able to contact her husband by phone or in closely observed visitation sessions.

EVERYDAY is, as the title may suggest, an honest and sometimes very moving depiction of the ordinariness of life…

Aided by strong and intensely natural performances from all involved – with the improvisational approach to the screenplay adding to this – EVERYDAY is, as the title may suggest, an honest and sometimes very moving depiction of the ordinariness of life. Filmed across five years, Winterbottom immerses himself into the inescapable nature of passing time, capturing with intimate detail the spontaneity of human emotions and the intrinsic bonds of love and family.

Displaying clearly developed and intensely close-knit relationships, the cast excel in humanising a family strung together by their perseverance and unyielding desire to stitch their patriarchal figure back into the fabric of their broken household. Minor key and intentionally atonal, but sometimes charred by Michael Nyman’s overblown score, EVERYDAY is a delicately handled drama that wears its heart on its unassuming sleeve.