It stars Anne Reid, Daniel Craig, Peter Vaughan, Steven Mackintosh, and Cathryn Bradshaw.

When her husband dies during a visit to their adult children in London, she has a chance to start again and pursue her love of drawing.

May is quiet but when her son Bobby tries to make her sit down and have a cup of tea she refuses, saying she might never get up and that she won't become invisible like all the neighbouring grandmothers and widows.

May initiates a sexual affair with Darren, a warm and attractive younger man who is renovating Bobby and Helen's house and who is also her daughter Paula's boyfriend.

Darren is disillusioned and frustrated by his life and his lack of autonomy and fights with May, seeking to assert himself by making May perform fellatio on him.

Things only become worse when May reveals that the financial "help" she had earlier promised him would be a plane ticket, to allow them to travel together, rather than cash as he had been anticipating.

[4] The site's critics consensus reads, "Reid gives a fearless, realistic performance in depicting an older woman's sexual blossoming.

[5] Stephen Holden of The New York Times called Reid "achingly believable" and said Craig brings an "undertone of volatile macho arrogance seething below a cultivated surface".

[6] Holden opined The Mother is better than Roger Michell's two best-known films, Notting Hill and Changing Lanes, and that "screenwriter Hanif Kureishi's even-handed view of the characters' frustrations and fantasies is infused with an unwavering Chekhovian compassion".

[6][7] With its centring on an older woman and a younger man, the film also received comparisons to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.

[8] Critic Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half out of four and praised the performances of Reid, Craig, and Bradshaw.