Immersions

McCarthy (Everyone Knows How Much I Love You) offers a tender yet tense story of estranged sisters who grew up studying ballet. Frances Garbinski, now in college in New York City, was unmoored when her older sister, Charley, drifted away from a successful dance career after a neck injury. For the past six years, Charley has secluded herself in a French convent. When Frances hears that Charley’s ex-husband, Johnny Fitcher, is in town, she tracks him down, believing he had mistreated Charley somehow and bears responsibility for her withdrawal. (“Sometimes we blame dance, but mostly we blame Johnny,” she narrates.) To her surprise, she bonds with Johnny over Charley’s absence, but hesitates to forge a friendship, especially after another one of Johnny’s exes accuses him on social media of bullying and gaslighting her. However, when he invites her to visit his family’s vacation home on Cup Island in the Long Island Sound, Frances cannot resist, determined to unravel the mystery of Charley’s withdrawal. There, she gradually tests the waters of a potential romance with Johnny, which leads her closer to answers about her sister. McCarthy writes astutely about dance as a double-edged sword that impassions the sisters but also damages them, and she mirrors this duality in her portrayal of Frances’s push-pull dynamic with Johnny. The result is magnetic. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (May)