When a car accident robs a family of mother and wife, Marianne (Hope Davis), Joe (Firth) takes his two daughters - teenage Kelly (Holland) and 10-year-old Mary (Haney-Jardine) - to Genoa for the summer. The three have different ways of dealing with their grief: Mary, suffering from recurring nightmares, blames her herself for the accident (Kelly blames her too) and imagines her mother's ghost has come with them; Kelly throws herself into the local social scene and falls for a boy; while Joe flirts with the idea of taking a student on a date.
Genova is a restrained drama about death and loss and Winterbottom avoids the cliches even though a story like this would beg him to indulge himself. Joe, Kelly and Mary rarely talk about Marianne but tragedy and the spectre of her death is never far away: the imposing alleys of the (beautifully shot) city, the seaside swim that hints at a drowning which never comes to pass, the stoned boyfriend that gives Kelly a ride home suggests an accident is imminent but it doesn't materialise. Everything here is low-key and the actors sing from the same hymn sheet: Firth is even more casual than the similarly themed And When Did You Last See Your Father?, while Holland and Haney-Jardine are cool and confident in difficult roles.
Although all this restraint and realism is good and well, Genova needed something to kick it off. There's no story as such - we just follow the three leads about the city watching what they get up to - and Winterbottom, who realises this, keeps the scenes really short and it's tactic that gives the film a pace that the story lacks.