The pair respond with varying trauma to the death of their mother (a touching cameo by Rita Tushingham, a British cinema icon since Tony Richardson's 1961 A Taste of Honey). Rose grows distant and treacherous, but the madcap Iris sinks into an inferno of sexual excess and debasement. Donning her mother's wig and clothing, Iris rebounds from one boozy, unwise encounter to the next. Although her rake's journey seems at times a little programmed and resolves patly, Morton strips off, with excruciating honesty, layers of artifice and dissembling to uncover her character's bleeding and triumphant essence -- she calls to mind (complete with intrusions of the supernatural) Emily Watson's tour-de-force in Lars von Trier's more transcendent Breaking the Waves. Adler's film has the handheld look, dense accents, and explosive histrionics one has come to expect from such working-class British melodramas, but she brings to it the kind of urgency and inspires the sort of performances that ensure that this movie is anything but skin deep.