Housekeeping

In the Pacific Northwest of the 1950s, two young sisters whose mother has abandoned them wind up living with their eccentric Aunt Sylvie (Christine Lahti), whose views of the world and its ways don’t quite live up to most people’s expectations. Scottish director Bill Forsyth’s mesmerizing adaptation (1987) of the now-classic Marilynne Robinson novel (1980), his first American film, is more than just “a commercial for the book,” as Forsyth himself modestly put it. With every shot, in every beat of Lahti’s performance, the line between the normal and the mystic grows gradually thinner, until (by its unforgettable finale) the normal has become the mystic, and the mystic normal. 116 minutes.