Teresa (Walters), the eldest, has become a zealous housewife who henpecks husband Frank (Wilkinson), a reluctant homeopathic salesman.

Middle daughter Mary (Whalley) is the successful child, a doctor who has been having an affair with a married colleague (Hannah) for years.

Catherine, at 33 still the baby of the family, uses the excuse of a rotten childhood to cling to a drug-filled, aimless Spanish life with her very latest lover, Xavier.

When Teresa arrives she wastes no time in digging out a biscuit tin full of papers and hiding it away from Mary.

Mary is furious to discover that not only has the tin gone but she has drawn the short straw over rooms - she must sleep in her dead mother's bed, haunted by the ghost of Violet (Hodge) in her favourite pale green cocktail dress.

But Violet has come to help her second daughter past her problems with lover Mike, who won't leave his wife and can¿t give her the child she so desperately wants.

And she hopes that, in the process, Mary will finally be able to forgive her for what happened when she was just 14 - the momentous consequences of which are documented in the biscuit tin.

Before You Go started life as a stage play by Shelagh Stephenson, who originally brought the family home for their mother's 70th birthday before deciding her funeral would make a better story.

The film runs a little too slowly, too sedately, but its nostalgia and sentimentality never get too cloying.

The best scene comes when the three sisters, intending to sort through their mother's clothes, end up getting plastered, dressing up in all her garish gowns and running amok, to the bemusement of Frank and Mike.

As in any family it's full of memories each sister has "appropriated" from each other, which have become fuzzy and distorted with each telling. As Violet tells Mary: "You invent these versions of me and I don't recognise myself."

But, like it or not, the family bond will never be broken and the sisters come to realise that their mother lives on, because she runs through them "like wine through water".

Suzanne Locke