Cert 15 101mins Stars 2

Despite being based on a true story, there’s not much for your attention to hold on to in this melancholy female-driven family drama.

It’s a stuffy, stage bound affair whose script questions whether children should feel responsible for the sins of their parents.

Juliet Stevenson plays a middle class London dress-maker who receives a letter explaining her Viennese mother is close to death, leading to four generations of her family gathering in Austria. 

However her mother proves remarkably resilient as well as unapologetically defiant about her wartime employment at a Nazi concentration camp.

Unfortunately the younger women come across as self obsessed, and their soap opera antics with the opposite sex seem more designed to pad out the running time than offer insight.

Chilly photography and an oppressive soundtrack strike a suitably somber tone. But there is insufficient drama to carry the weighty issues, reducing the horrors of the Holocaust to the need for a group hug.