This gripping and harrowing film is based on Marsha Norman's Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Sissy Spacek stars as Jessie, a loner who lives with her mother (Anne Bancroft). One night this young woman announces "I'm going to kill myself." Like the hired man in Robert Frost's poem, she has nothing to look backward to with pride and nothing to look forward to in hope. Jessie has shriveled up inside and is consumed with self-hate.

In the spirit of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, this film speaks volumes about the anger, pain, guilt and misunderstandings which often coexist in a hurting family. On another important level, this drama illuminates the subtle and terrifying link between the death of love and the love of death.

Screenwriter Marsh Norman has written: "We all know people who have killed themselves and we are hurt and confused and we would like to understand even if we can't accept what they did." 'Night Mother, directed by Tom Moore, is one of the few films around that addresses that need to understand the complex roots of suicide.